explain-interpreter

explain-interpreter is a skill for Claude Code from sigistry/marketplace. It costs 95 tokens per session (1,000 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for reading PostgreSQL and MySQL query plans, which show how a database intends to run a query and, when measured, what actually happened.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to interpret pasted EXPLAIN or EXPLAIN ANALYZE output and identify suitable indexes or query rewrites.
Why use it?
It turns technical plan details such as sequential scans, nested loops, estimates, and timing into a plain-language diagnosis of slow queries.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the sql-safety-net plugin — 3 skills, 5 commands, 2 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to interpret pasted EXPLAIN or EXPLAIN ANALYZE output and identify suitable indexes or query rewrites.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sigistry/marketplace/explain-interpreter
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 sigistry/marketplace --skill explain-interpreter
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sigistry/marketplace

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install sql-safety-net, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 5 commands, 2 agents.

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-interpreter

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sigistry/marketplace/explain-interpreter.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sigistry/marketplace/explain-interpreter)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sigistry/marketplace/explain-interpreter"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sigistry/marketplace/explain-interpreter.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 95 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,000 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00095 $0.01000
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.00500
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00200
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00100

Measured 5d ago against content hash b2acb7ceb09e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

explain-interpreter 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 5d 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/sql-safety-net/skills/explain-interpreter/SKILL.md · 45 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 45 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Explain Interpreter

Purpose

Provide a standardized way to read a query plan, Postgres or MySQL, text or JSON, and convert it into a plain-language diagnosis and a concrete fix, statically, from pasted output. A plan is a tree of nodes; the database executes the leaves first and passes rows up. The skill is knowing which node is actually eating the time and what that node's presence implies.

Reading methodology

  1. Identify the format and whether it was analyzed. EXPLAIN alone gives estimates; EXPLAIN ANALYZE (Postgres) / EXPLAIN ANALYZE (MySQL 8) gives actual rows, time, and loops. Only actuals prove a bad estimate.
  2. Find the dominant node. Read inside-out. A node's cost/time includes its children, so compute self time = node time − children's time, and for inner nodes of a loop, multiply by loops. The node with the largest self time (not the root) is the target.
  3. Read the node's meaning (see references/postgres-explain-nodes.md / references/mysql-explain.md).
  4. Scan for red flags (below).
  5. Prescribe an index (right columns, right order) or a rewrite.

The single most important number: estimate vs actual

(cost=... rows=1000) is the planner's estimate; (actual ... rows=920000 loops=1) is reality. A large skew (planner thought 1 row, got 900k) means the planner chose the wrong strategy (often a nested loop that would have been a hash join). Causes: stale statistics (ANALYZE), correlated predicates the planner assumes independent, or expressions it cannot estimate. Fix the estimate and the plan often fixes itself.

Red-flag catalog

Red flag What the DB is doing Fix
Seq Scan / type: ALL on a big table with a selective WHERE Reading every row to find a few Index the filter column
rows estimate ≪ actual (loops) Planner mis-estimated → wrong join ANALYZE; decorrelate; extended statistics
Nested Loop with high inner loops Row-by-row inner lookups, N× Index the inner join key; enable hash join
SortSort Method: external merge Disk Sort spilled to disk Index matching ORDER BY; raise work_mem
Using filesort / Using temporary (MySQL) Sorting/deduping without an index Composite index over WHERE+ORDER BY
Buffers: ... read≫hit Cold data, heavy I/O Fewer rows scanned; covering index
Index exists but a Seq Scan is chosen Predicate not sargable / type mismatch Rewrite predicate; match types; expression index
Wide width= with SELECT * in an index-only candidate Heap fetch forced INCLUDE/covering columns

Read the full file on GitHub · 45 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. 5d ago First seen · 45 lines · 95 tokens per session scan A b2acb7ceb09e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

explain-interpreter is a skill published in the GitHub repository sigistry/marketplace (3 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 95 tokens to every session and 1,000 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 2026-09-03.

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