transparent-icons

transparent-icons is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from neuromechanist/research-skills. It costs 147 tokens per session (1,426 once invoked), scanned A, original, BSD-3-Clause.

An image-generation skill for making flat scientific icons with transparent backgrounds, such as icons used in figures, posters, presentations, and grant materials.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to make individual icons or batches of icons, including brain-related and other scientific subjects.
Why use it?
It provides a way to create matching scientific graphics and can turn generated opaque images into transparent PNGs.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: shipped in a Claude Code plugin, but also reads ~/.codex or $CODEX_HOME. Also seen: mentions Codex.

Part of the figures plugin — 7 skills, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit Use it to make individual icons or batches of icons, including brain-related and other scientific subjects.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/neuromechanist/research-skills/transparent-icons
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add neuromechanist/research-skills --skill transparent-icons
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/neuromechanist/research-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install figures, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills, 1 agent.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for transparent-icons

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/neuromechanist/research-skills/transparent-icons/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/neuromechanist/research-skills/transparent-icons)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/neuromechanist/research-skills/transparent-icons"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/neuromechanist/research-skills/transparent-icons/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for transparent-icons

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/neuromechanist/research-skills/transparent-icons"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/neuromechanist/research-skills/transparent-icons.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 147 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,426 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Rogue Agent · line 3
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00147 $0.01426
Opus 5 $0.00073 $0.00713
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.00285
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00143

Measured 12d ago against content hash be1b84d371b8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

transparent-icons scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (examples/icon_set.py, scripts/generate_icon.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/figures/skills/transparent-icons/SKILL.md · 102 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 102 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Transparent Icons

Generate flat scientific icons (Nature/Science journal style) with transparent backgrounds. Used as panel elements by the [[scientific-figure]] composer or as standalone graphics for posters, presentations, and grants.

Backends

Two generation backends, auto-selected:

  1. Codex CLI image_gen tool (preferred). Uses the local Codex authentication (~/.codex/auth.json). No OPENAI_API_KEY required. Internally uses gpt-image-2 (April 2026). Default when codex is on $PATH and authenticated.
  2. OpenAI Images API (fallback). Calls client.images.generate(model="gpt-image-2", ...) directly. Requires OPENAI_API_KEY in environment or .env.

Why two backends: many researchers have a ChatGPT subscription and codex login but no separate API key. Auto-selection routes through Codex first to keep the no-API-key path working; explicit --backend codex or --backend api overrides.

Transparency

gpt-image-2 (April 2026) does not accept background="transparent" — both backends always generate opaque PNGs. Transparency is applied as a post-process. Two methods:

  • threshold (default) — drop near-white pixels via Pillow. Fast, no extra deps. Works well for flat 2-color icons on a clean white background. Can leave fringes on anti-aliased edges and may erase highlights where the foreground itself is near-white.
  • birefnet (opt-in) — rembg + BiRefNet ONNX model with alpha matting. Cleaner edges, handles complex foregrounds. One-time ~400 MB model download on first run; requires extra deps (rembg, onnxruntime).

Pick threshold for the canonical flat-icon use case. Pick birefnet when the icon contains light-colored content (white parts of a brain MRI, light reflections on glass) that the threshold method would erase, or when the icon will be composited at large sizes where fringes are visible.

Usage

Free-form prompt:

uv run --with openai --with python-dotenv --with pillow python scripts/generate_icon.py \
    "a human brain with EEG electrodes" -o brain_eeg.png --transparent

Read the full file on GitHub · 102 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 102 lines · 147 tokens per session scan A be1b84d371b8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

transparent-icons is a skill published in the GitHub repository neuromechanist/research-skills (45 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed BSD-3-Clause. It adds 147 tokens to every session and 1,426 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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