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.
npx agentmods add skills/pandysp/claude-plugins/explorenpx skills add pandysp/claude-plugins --skill exploregit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pandysp/claude-pluginsWhat 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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00104 | $0.00785 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00052 | $0.00392 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00021 | $0.00157 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00078 |
Grade A, and why
explore 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 2d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 52 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Explore: map the terrain before designing
Designing without exploring produces options grounded in general priors rather than the actual terrain. They look reasonable in the abstract but don't fit how this codebase / client / domain actually works.
This skill enforces a discipline: before any design step, systematically map what's already there. Existing patterns, hard constraints, hooks, and things that would surprise you if you weren't looking.
Tooling
Match the tool to the operation, not the domain:
- Autonomous broad exploration. When the host offers fresh, read-only exploration workers, spawn one when scope is known and several in parallel when scope is uncertain or spans subsystems. Give each worker a distinct search focus. If no worker channel exists, perform the same focused passes with the host's search and file-reading capabilities.
- Targeted lookups. Use the host's search and file-reading capabilities directly when you need raw content in your own context.
- Non-codebase sources. File reads against notes/docs, web search, MCP queries.
The four phases
The phases apply across domains. Adapt depth and tooling. The questions generalize even when the artifacts don't.
1. Locate: find what's relevant
What artifacts, sources, prior work, or context are in play? Don't accept the user's framing as the boundary. Adjacent material often turns out to be critical.
2. Trace: follow how things connect
Where does data/argument flow? What depends on what? Which derivations are critical? A trace is complete when you followed the primary artifact end to end: ingress, persistence, consumption.
3. Pattern: identify conventions
What recurring shapes and established ways of doing things exist? Fighting them creates friction; fitting them removes it.
4. Constrain: name the hard limits
What would create problems if violated? Knowing these upfront prevents proposing options that get killed in review.
What to surface
Most findings stay in your context. Surface only surprises, hard constraints, gotchas, and genuine ambiguities that need user input before design can proceed. If exploration was uneventful, say that plainly. The detailed terrain map stays in your context for the next phase.
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 52 lines · 104 tokens per session scan A b3c33cff56be
explore is a skill published in the GitHub repository pandysp/claude-plugins (5 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 104 tokens to every session and 785 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-31.
Other skills, from other repositories
systematic-debugging
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.
brainstorming
You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.
auto-perf-optimize
Run agent-driven VS Code performance or memory investigations. Use when asked to launch Code OSS, automate a VS Code scenario, run the Chat memory smoke runner, capture renderer heap snapshots, take workflow screenshots, compare run summaries, or drive a repeatable scenario before heap-snapshot analysis.
chat-perf
Run chat perf benchmarks and memory leak checks against the local dev build or any published VS Code version. Use when investigating chat rendering regressions, validating perf-sensitive changes to chat UI, or checking for memory leaks in the chat response pipeline.
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.
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…