A guide to explaining how a codebase works, including its layers, ownership, runtime flow, and the right place for a change.

Use it for code walkthroughs, onboarding, architecture questions, and deciding which package or layer should contain a feature.

It gives developers a practical mental model before they modify unfamiliar code or move responsibilities between parts.

how — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by pantheon-org

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 pantheon-org/tekhne --skill how

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pantheon-org/tekhne

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/how/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/how)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/how"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/how/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/how"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/how.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 115 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 3,454 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.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00115	$0.03454
Opus 5	$0.00057	$0.01727
Sonnet 5	$0.00023	$0.00691
Haiku 4.5	$0.00012	$0.00345

Measured 9d ago against content hash bffc8ef94abc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

how 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 9d 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/software-engineering/how/SKILL.md · 232 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 232 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

How

Ported from the how skill in cursor/plugins pstack — Cursor, a separate AI-coding-editor product, not to be confused with a text/DB cursor — for use with this harness's Agent tool. Agent-spawning mechanics below use this repo's actual subagent types (Explore, general-purpose) and Claude model/effort params (sonnet/opus/haiku/fable, low/medium/high/xhigh/max) in place of the original's model names specific to that other editor, and its readonly flag.

One more adaptation, not cosmetic: the original has every explorer/synthesizer/critic use Glob/Grep/Read directly. If your environment has a code-graph MCP (e.g. tokensave, code-review-graph), prefer its structural query tools (tokensave_context and friends) over raw file search — they return relevant source directly and track symbols across renames, which Glob/Grep/Read cannot do. Every codebase-reading step below names the code-graph tool first and Glob/Grep/Read as the fallback when no such tool is connected. If your code-graph tool supports a per-worktree index, re-index the current worktree before relying on it — a stale index can silently omit symbols only changed there.

Explore the codebase to answer "how does X work?" questions. Produce clear architectural explanations at the level of a senior engineer onboarding onto a subsystem. Enough to build a working mental model, not annotated source code.

Two modes:

Explain (default). Explore the codebase and produce a clear explanation
Critique. Explain first, then spawn multiple independent reviewers to identify architectural issues

Prerequisites

A question scoped to this codebase, not a general architecture question with nothing to explore
For critique mode specifically: the explanation from Explain mode already produced, since critique never runs standalone
No code-graph MCP is required — Glob/Grep/Read work, a code-graph tool (e.g. tokensave) is just cheaper when one is connected

Read the full file on GitHub · 232 lines

Files

What ships with it

24 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.

9d ago First seen · 232 lines · 115 tokens per session scan A bffc8ef94abc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

how is a skill published in the GitHub repository pantheon-org/tekhne (10 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 115 tokens to every session and 3,454 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-09-03.

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how