explain

An explanation guide for Scriptorium, a set of manuscript-writing and review tools, or for one of its named skills or shared manuscript-state fields. It explains what the selected item reads, produces, and does not cover.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to learn how Scriptorium works, understand a particular skill, or clarify a field in MANUSCRIPT_STATE.yaml, its shared configuration file.
Why use it?
It gives users a grounded overview before they use an unfamiliar tool, without changing manuscript files or automatically starting another skill.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/seandavi/scriptorium/explain
Any agent
npx skills add seandavi/scriptorium --skill explain
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/seandavi/scriptorium

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 136 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,895 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 $0.00136 $0.02895
Opus 5 $0.00068 $0.01448
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.00579
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00290

Measured yesterday against content hash 8951fcb90cc6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

explain 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 yesterday.

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/SKILL.md · 334 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 334 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

explain: synthesize a tour of scriptorium

You are running scriptorium's explain skill. Your job is to produce a clear, grounded explanation of scriptorium itself, a named skill, or a named MANUSCRIPT_STATE.yaml field — by reading the plugin's own files (SKILL.md, knowledge/*.md, schemas/manuscript-state.schema.json) and synthesizing.

You consume no manuscript content. This skill is read-only relative to the user's project.

Invocation discipline

Invoke this skill when:

  • The user types /scriptorium:explain (whole-system overview).
  • The user types /scriptorium:explain <name> where <name> is a skill name (init, citation-audit, reviewer-simulation, argumentative-flow, explain itself) or a MANUSCRIPT_STATE.yaml field (e.g. core_claims, known_weaknesses, meta.guidance_level).
  • A leaf skill running at the full guidance level has suggested the user might want a tour before invoking it.

Do not invoke explain as a side-effect of running another skill, and do not chain into a follow-up skill after explaining. Explanation is a discrete action; the user invokes what they want next.

What "input" means

Look at the argument string the user passed:

  1. No argument → whole-system overview.
  2. Skill name — matches a directory under skills/<name>/ that contains a SKILL.md. Recognised names in v0.1: init, citation-audit, reviewer-simulation, argumentative-flow, explain.
  3. Schema field name — appears in schemas/manuscript-state.schema.json as a property key (top-level or nested, dotted: e.g. meta.guidance_level, terminology.forbidden).
  4. Knowledge note slug or [[wiki-link]] name — matches a file under knowledge/ (resolve a [[slug]] by basename match across the tree).

If the argument is ambiguous (matches both a skill and a field, or no candidate found), ask the user to disambiguate; do not guess.

Operational protocol

A. Whole-system overview (no argument)

Read the full file on GitHub · 334 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. yesterday First seen · 334 lines · 136 tokens per session scan A 8951fcb90cc6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

explain is a skill published in the GitHub repository seandavi/scriptorium (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 136 tokens to every session and 2,895 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 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

skillpack-creator

Create a reusable SkillPack from a successful completed task. Use when the user wants to convert a one-off research, coding, analysis, or content workflow into a distributable local SkillPack with skillpack.json, local skills under skills/, starter prompts, start scripts, and an optional zip package.

CreminiAI/skillpack · 67 tokens

skill-creator

Create new skills, modify and improve existing skills, and measure skill performance. Use when users want to create a skill from scratch, edit, or optimize an existing skill, run evals to test a skill, benchmark skill performance with variance analysis, or optimize a skill's description for better triggering accuracy.

CreminiAI/skillpack · 64 tokens

super-design

Use when the user asks you to build, style, theme, refine, audit, or recreate UI — or uploads a screenshot to rebuild. Reads DESIGN.md as a closed token layer, detects the project's framework (Tailwind v4/v3, ShadCN, MUI, Radix, Geist), and enforces production design rules (tokens only, full state matrix, WCAG 2.2 AA…

Eldergenix/SUPER-DESIGN · 122 tokens

deep-modules

Measures module depth: whether the interface is simple relative to the implementation behind it. Use when an interface has too many parameters or methods, many small classes each do too little, or methods just forward calls. Not for whether adjacent layers provide different abstractions (use abstraction-quality) or…

codybrom/clairvoyance · 71 tokens

red-flags

Scans code against 17 design smells (the book's 14 named Red Flags plus 3 process-stage signals) and produces a structured diagnostic report. Use when reviewing a PR against a comprehensive checklist, evaluating unfamiliar code, or when the user asks for a red flags scan. Not for diagnosing why code feels complex (use…

codybrom/clairvoyance · 86 tokens

comments-docs

Reviews comment quality and documentation practices: the four comment types, comments-first workflow, and comment rot. Use when reviewing comments or docs, when comments just repeat the code, or when something is hard to describe in a sentence. Not for naming or code obviousness (use naming-obviousness).

codybrom/clairvoyance · 63 tokens