explainer-diagrams

explainer-diagrams is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ussumant/useful-agent-skills. It costs 122 tokens per session (2,235 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Build explainer diagrams as HTML+SVG scenes in one consistent visual grammar (pixel-font title, mono subtitle, blue/orange cards and arrows, dashed containers, network circles, stat tiles, a one-line callout) and shoot each to a PNG with puppeteer. Use whenever a concept, story, trace, comparison, or set of numbers…

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths.

Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ussumant/useful-agent-skills/explainer-diagrams
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 ussumant/useful-agent-skills --skill explainer-diagrams
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ussumant/useful-agent-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 explainer-diagrams

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ussumant/useful-agent-skills/explainer-diagrams/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ussumant/useful-agent-skills/explainer-diagrams)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ussumant/useful-agent-skills/explainer-diagrams"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ussumant/useful-agent-skills/explainer-diagrams/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 explainer-diagrams

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ussumant/useful-agent-skills/explainer-diagrams"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ussumant/useful-agent-skills/explainer-diagrams.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 122 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,235 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 $0.00122 $0.02235
Opus 5 $0.00061 $0.01118
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00447
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00224

Measured today against content hash 326b9224645b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-14, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

explainer-diagrams 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 today.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (shoot.mjs), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/explainer-diagrams/SKILL.md · 140 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 140 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Explainer diagrams

A diagram in this grammar is a scene: shapes, positions, and arrows that carry the meaning, with few words. The first attempt at this usually comes out as a table in nice colors. The verdict that produced this skill was "they're not visual, they look boring." Read examples/severance-week/ before your first diagram: index.html is the source of seven diagrams and out/ holds the PNGs they produced. That is the reference implementation.

The grammar

token value used for
blue #1a52e0 flow, structure, the real thing card strokes, solid arrows, solid nodes, stat numbers, index badge
orange #d66b2f intervention, return path, the outside hand dashed arrows, seed cards (#fff3ea tint), rewind
panel #f5f7ff containers, callouts dashed container fill, callout background
gray #aaa / #f2f2f2 invalid, scripted, never happened hollow nodes, struck-through lines, "never entered" boxes
text #666, muted #767676, ink #000

Type: Pixelify Sans (Google Fonts) for the title and the callout heading only; system mono for everything else; system sans bold only for card labels and node names. Cards are white, 1px stroke, border-radius: 3px. Arrows use a 6×6 triangle <marker>, one per diagram with a unique id.

Components (all in template.html): .shot (1100px white sheet, 40px padding; the PNG is this element) → .shot-head (blue mono index 01, Pixelify <h2>, one-line mono <p>) → .scene (1020px, #fbfbfb, 1px border; the picture) → optional .stat-row of .stat-tile (big blue mono number over a gray label) → optional .callout (blue left border, Pixelify one-liner + one mono sentence) → optional .footnote (11px mono caveat). Card variants: .tint-orange, .tint-blue, .solid, .dashed, .gray; inside a card: .tag (mono caps), .label (sans bold), .sub (mono body). components.md has copy-paste snippets for every piece.

Scene, not table

  • One idea per diagram. The title says it, the scene shows it, the callout says what it means in one line. If it needs a paragraph, it is two diagrams.
  • Shapes carry the meaning: a line that thickens day by day, a path that stops short of a box with an ×, a hollow node beside solid ones, a strike-through on the canned line, a bar split into scored segments. The reader should get it before reading a word.
  • Words are receipts, not prose: quotes ≤ 14 words with an ellipsis, never reworded; ids and times in mono beside them; ≤ ~10 text objects per scene.
  • Nothing smaller than 13px at the 1020px scene. Most newsletter and forum layouts show the PNG at ~700px wide. Stat numbers 24px, titles 27px.
  • Every number and quote comes from a source file, verbatim. A caption or a callout is a factual claim; check it against the source before shooting.
  • Footnotes carry method caveats. Never reference an unpublished URL or "see 01–06 above" inside a PNG that will travel on its own.

Read the full file on GitHub · 140 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. today First seen · 140 lines · 122 tokens per session scan A 326b9224645b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

explainer-diagrams is a skill published in the GitHub repository ussumant/useful-agent-skills (5 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 122 tokens to every session and 2,235 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 2026-09-14.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories