teach-back

teach-back is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from tmusser/ai-engineering-skills. It costs 34 tokens per session (1,037 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided handoff that checks whether a person understands a verified implementation, including its behavior, design choices, and failure cases.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after testing a change when someone must review, debug, maintain, or extend it. It is also useful when the implementation uses unfamiliar technology or has non-obvious control flow.
Why use it?
It helps transfer practical ownership instead of leaving someone dependent on an agent-generated code explanation. It focuses on correcting important misunderstandings.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it after testing a change when someone must review, debug, maintain, or extend it. It is also useful when the implementation uses unfamiliar technology or has non-obvious control flow.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tmusser/ai-engineering-skills/teach-back
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 tmusser/ai-engineering-skills --skill teach-back
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tmusser/ai-engineering-skills

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.

agentmods badge for teach-back

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tmusser/ai-engineering-skills/teach-back/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tmusser/ai-engineering-skills/teach-back)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tmusser/ai-engineering-skills/teach-back"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tmusser/ai-engineering-skills/teach-back/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for teach-back

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tmusser/ai-engineering-skills/teach-back"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tmusser/ai-engineering-skills/teach-back.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,037 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 $0.00034 $0.01037
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00518
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00207
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00104

Measured 9d ago against content hash 0bd03acd4ec9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

teach-back 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/teach-back/SKILL.md · 102 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 102 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Teach Back

Purpose

Turn a verified implementation into transferable human understanding.

Transfer ownership, do not narrate the diff. The goal is for the human to explain, debug, and safely modify the implementation rather than merely receive an agent-generated code tour.

Test understanding, do not assume it. Ask for a small teach-back attempt before supplying a complete explanation, then repair only material gaps using implementation evidence.

When to use

Use after trustworthy verification when at least one learning trigger exists:

  • the implementation introduced an unfamiliar technology, pattern, or dependency
  • a consequential design decision or trade-off should remain human-owned
  • the control flow, state transition, data path, or failure mode is non-obvious
  • the human expects to review, debug, maintain, or extend the change later
  • learning from the implementation is an explicit task goal

Skip boilerplate, tiny reversible patches, familiar work, and tasks where the human does not want a learning pass.

This skill is optional. A completed implementation does not require a teach-back ritual. Use verify-contract for correctness evidence and handoff for continuation state.

Inputs

  • Current task contract or SPEC.md
  • Verified changed files or git diff
  • VERIFY.md and relevant test evidence
  • The human's stated learning goal or current familiarity when available
  • Directly relevant architecture, interfaces, schemas, or runtime behavior

Workflow

  1. Confirm that implementation verification is trustworthy enough to teach from. If correctness is unresolved, stop and route to verify-contract or diagnosis first.
  2. Confirm that a learning trigger exists. If none exists, say that teach-back is not needed and stop.
  3. Select the smallest useful learning target:
    • one behavior path
    • no more than three consequential decisions, concepts, or failure seams
    • one likely maintenance or debugging responsibility
  4. Build a compact, source-grounded implementation map. Trace the task through the changed system, for example:

Read the full file on GitHub · 102 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.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 102 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 0bd03acd4ec9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

teach-back is a skill published in the GitHub repository tmusser/ai-engineering-skills (4 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 1,037 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

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