A plain-language explainer for a topic, file, name, link, or pasted text. It first reads the available material and explains it for someone with no background knowledge.

Use it to understand an unfamiliar library, configuration file, business term, code concept, or piece of text. It can look for the relevant version in the repository before giving a general explanation.

Technical explanations often repeat the subject's own vocabulary or add made-up examples. This avoids both by using simple words and sticking to evidence from the target.

eli5 — Skill for Claude Code by thoughtbot/rails-consultant

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 thoughtbot/rails-consultant --skill eli5

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/thoughtbot/rails-consultant

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install rails-consultant, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 15 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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/eli5/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/eli5)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/eli5"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/eli5/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/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/eli5"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/eli5.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 13 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,959 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	$0.00013	$0.01959
Opus 5.5	$0.00005	$0.00784
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00003	$0.00392
Haiku 4.5	$0.00001	$0.00196

Measured yesterday against content hash 2dc092f90e4c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

eli5 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/eli5/SKILL.md · 180 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 180 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ELI5

The user has no foothold. /understand questions them about a model they already hold; here there is no model to question, and asking produces a guess you then have to correct. So read the thing, then explain it — plainly, concretely, once.

Two ways this fails. You explain it in the vocabulary of the thing itself ("the reconciler converges the cluster toward desired state"), which only reads to someone who already understands it. Or you reach for concreteness and invent it: a config value that isn't in the file, a sample record nobody has. The invented one is worse, because it's memorable, wrong, and this reader has nothing to catch it with.

1. Find the thing

The target is $ARGUMENTS, or ask. It arrives as a path, a name they keep seeing (sidekiq, helm, useEffect), a word off a ticket (chargeback, dunning), a link, or pasted text.

A path is the thing. A name or a word gets looked for in this repo first — manifests, config, grep -ri — since the version this codebase uses beats the general one, which covers ten features they'll never touch. Not here at all? Say so in one line, explain it in general, and skip the trace agent below; there's nothing for it to read.

A directory: pick its entry point and say that's what you took. Don't ask what they already know or what they mean to do with it — questions are what they came here to be spared.

2. Send agents to read it

Launch subagents in parallel (Explore, or general-purpose) and wait. Three angles, one agent each:

What it's for. What job this does for a person, who that person is, and what visibly breaks if it vanishes. Tell the agent to answer without using the thing's own vocabulary, or it hands back the README's first paragraph.
One real trace. A single instance start to finish, in order, with the branch at each step and what happens when it fails — real route, real config value, a row from seeds or fixtures, a real filename, cited file:line. This is what step 4 draws.
The words. Every term a newcomer would bounce off, and what each means in this repo, which is usually narrower than in general.

Read the full file on GitHub · 180 lines

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.

yesterday First seen · 180 lines · 13 tokens per session scan A 2dc092f90e4c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

eli5 is a skill published in the GitHub repository thoughtbot/rails-consultant (29 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 13 tokens to every session and 1,959 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-11-07.

Learning and teaching claude-code-consulting claude-code-plugin claude-code-rails claude-code-skill claude-code-skills claude-skills

eli5 next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
eli5thoughtbot/rails-consultant	Skill	29	yesterday	MIT	A	13	Claude Code
learn-from-fixoliver-kriska/claude-elixir-phoenix	Skill	573	2d ago	MIT	A	46	Claude Code
elixir-idiomsoliver-kriska/claude-elixir-phoenix	Skill	573	2d ago	MIT	A	44	Claude Code
examplesoliver-kriska/claude-elixir-phoenix	Skill	573	2d ago	MIT	A	57	Claude Code
introoliver-kriska/claude-elixir-phoenix	Skill	573	2d ago	MIT	A	44	Claude Code
csiftwdhwg001/csift	Skill	34	1mo ago	MIT	A	227	Claude Code, Codex
recursive-decompositionmassimodeluisa/recursive-decomposition-skill	Skill	54	1mo ago	MIT	A	144	Claude Code