instruction-understanding-gate

instruction-understanding-gate is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin. It costs 43 tokens per session (914 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A checkpoint for confirming that a long or unclear request has been understood before substantial work begins.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to restate complex instructions, check their context, and surface any remaining ambiguity.
Why use it?
It helps prevent costly work based on a mistaken interpretation of the request.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: shipped in a Claude Code plugin, but also agents/openai.yaml present.

Part of the odin-core plugin — 16 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to restate complex instructions, check their context, and surface any remaining ambiguity.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/instruction-understanding-gate
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 OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin --skill instruction-understanding-gate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install odin-core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 skills.

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 instruction-understanding-gate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/instruction-understanding-gate/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/instruction-understanding-gate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/instruction-understanding-gate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/instruction-understanding-gate/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 instruction-understanding-gate

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/instruction-understanding-gate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/instruction-understanding-gate.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 914 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 pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00043 $0.00914
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00457
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00183
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00091

Measured 3d ago against content hash 09b4bbf36feb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

instruction-understanding-gate 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 3d 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.

plugins/odin-core/skills/instruction-understanding-gate/SKILL.md · 55 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 55 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Instruction understanding gate

Verify understanding before acting.

Contract

Field Bound contract
Trigger Long/bundled/high-stakes/hard-to-undo instruction, or ambiguous scope/referents (this, that, it, whatever is cleaner)
Authority Reversible local: writes at most one durable understood-as log line for substantial work, after the gate decision; rollback is revert to pre-check state. No remote mutation.
Side effect None before the gate passes; at most one clarifying question and one durable understood-as log line for substantial work
Done Restatement is a paraphrase; every surfaced fork is genuinely unresolved by available context; no substantial work starts otherwise

Inputs

The user's instruction and all readable context: the current message, session history, project memory files, filesystem, and established project conventions. The model obtains these inputs; the user does not need to provide an artifact.

Procedure

  1. Check the read signal. Recognize when the instruction is long, multi-part, ambiguous in scope or referents, deliberately flexible, or high-stakes enough that a wrong read costs real work. If none of these signals are present, stop. Done when: the matched signals are named, or none is and the gate stops here.

  2. Restate the instruction. Paraphrase the instruction in the agent's own words. Do not copy the user's wording and treat that as understanding. Done when: the instruction is paraphrased in the agent's own words, not copied from the user.

  3. Cross-check against context. Compare the restatement against all available context: the current message, session history, project memory, files on disk, and established conventions. Look for contradictions, missing antecedents, or two plausible readings that context cannot choose between. Done when: the restatement is cross-checked against all available context and any contradictions, missing antecedents, or unresolvable forks are identified.

Read the full file on GitHub · 55 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 3d ago Changed · -24 tokens per session 09b4bbf36feb
  2. 5d ago First seen · 55 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A 88ce8c2d99a0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

instruction-understanding-gate is a skill published in the GitHub repository OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin (35 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 914 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-09-04.

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