explain-concept

explain-concept is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin. It costs 56 tokens per session (688 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A teaching skill for explaining one concept clearly by building intuition, showing a small example, describing its purpose or history, or comparing it with a similar idea.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to explain what a concept means, why it exists, where it came from, how it looks, or how it differs from another concept.
Why use it?
It helps developers understand unfamiliar ideas instead of only memorising instructions or definitions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: argument-hint in frontmatter, but also agents/openai.yaml present.

Part of the odin plugin — 29 skills, 14 plugins shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/explain-concept
Any agent
npx skills add OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin --skill explain-concept
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install odin, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 29 skills, 14 plugins.

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 explain-concept

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/explain-concept.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/explain-concept)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/explain-concept"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/explain-concept.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 56 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 688 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00056 $0.00688
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00344
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00138
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00069

Measured 6d ago against content hash 860f6b662a29, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

explain-concept 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 6d ago.

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.

skills/explain-concept/SKILL.md · 47 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 47 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

One concept, one angle per run. The table picks the angle unless the argument names it directly.

Pick the angle

An explicit argument overrides the table; no match means intuition.

The user asks Angle
"what is really going on", "I don't get it", "explain it simply" intuition
"why does this exist", "what problem does it solve", "why not just X" motivation
"where did this come from", "who came up with it", "what did it replace" origin
"draw it", "what does it look like" picture
"what is the difference", "when do I use X instead of Y" contrast

intuition

One analogy drawn from something the learner already owns, the smallest example showing the behaviour, and the one sentence that survives when they forget the rest. Then stop and ask them to restate it in their own words. Done when the restatement exists and has been confirmed or corrected. One screen.

motivation

What people did before this existed, where that broke, what this buys, what it costs. Leave history to the origin angle. Done when all four are on the page and the cost is real rather than a token concession. One screen.

origin

Who, when, what it displaced, one citation the learner can go read. The search and approval protocol is in references/ORIGIN-SEARCH.md. Done when a citation is on the page or the user declined the search. Fifteen lines. Asked for alongside the intuition, run the intuition first: the evidence that history teaches is thin, so this is a hook rather than a prerequisite, and saying so when the user opens here is part of the angle.

picture

One diagram, authored per the diagram-contract skill: nomnoml for structure and flow, D2 for architecture, house palette, rendered SVG committed beside its source in assets/. Done when the render exits zero and the embed carries its alt text and caption. A concept with no structure, flow, or architecture worth drawing gets one line saying so instead; a box drawn around a definition costs attention and returns nothing.

Read the full file on GitHub · 47 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 6d ago First seen · 47 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A 860f6b662a29

Subscribe to this mod's changes

explain-concept is a skill published in the GitHub repository OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin (35 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 56 tokens to every session and 688 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

local-ai-agents

Build local-first AI agents that run entirely on a developer workstation with Microsoft Foundry Local and Qwen function-calling models. Covers Small Language Models (SLMs), the OpenAI-compatible local endpoint, sandboxed local tools, local RAG with Chroma, local MCP servers, hybrid cloud/local routing, and the…

microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners · 200 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

chat-pet-sprite-creation

Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.

microsoft/vscode · 53 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens

insight-error-page

Write or audit an insight-kind error page for the Next.js dev overlay. Use when creating a new errors/ .mdx page, auditing an existing one, or checking that a page matches the framework fix cards. Covers page structure, title alignment, FixCard cards with Copy prompt button, code snippets, terminology verification…

vercel/next.js · 83 tokens