exploration-log

exploration-log is a skill for Claude Code from vidhunnan/agentic-skills. It costs 126 tokens per session (2,483 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An append-only record of design experiments: what each iteration tested, what changed, what was learned, and whether the direction was kept, rejected, or postponed.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after layout, interface, or visual design rounds to record decisions and lessons. You can also search the log to check whether a proposed direction was tried before.
Why use it?
It preserves rejected design ideas and the reasons behind decisions, so teams do not unknowingly repeat old work. Append-only means earlier entries remain unchanged while new rounds are added.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; names the AskUserQuestion tool; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the exploration-log plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit Use it after layout, interface, or visual design rounds to record decisions and lessons. You can also search the log to check whether a proposed direction was tried before.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vidhunnan/agentic-skills/exploration-log
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 vidhunnan/agentic-skills --skill exploration-log
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vidhunnan/agentic-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install exploration-log, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

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 exploration-log

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vidhunnan/agentic-skills/exploration-log/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vidhunnan/agentic-skills/exploration-log)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vidhunnan/agentic-skills/exploration-log"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vidhunnan/agentic-skills/exploration-log/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 exploration-log

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vidhunnan/agentic-skills/exploration-log"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vidhunnan/agentic-skills/exploration-log.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 126 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,483 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 $0.00126 $0.02483
Opus 5 $0.00063 $0.01241
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00497
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00248

Measured 9d ago against content hash 151c00726341, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

exploration-log 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/exploration-log/SKILL.md · 203 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 203 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

exploration-log

Writes the tier no design tool has: a durable record of what was tried and killed, and why.

The failure it prevents is specific. You run four passes at a layout, keep the fourth, delete the other three. Six months later someone proposes direction two again — and nobody can say whether it was already tried or why it lost, so it gets tried again at full cost. Meanwhile the surviving design carries details that were load-bearing decisions in round two and read as invisible leftovers by round five.

Git solves this for code by accident: the rejected approach stays in the history whether you wanted it or not. Design has no equivalent. The alternative is deleted from the file and gone.

Three rules govern this skill:

  • Append-only. A killed direction is never deleted. That record is the tier. Prior rounds are frozen; new rounds are appended.
  • Never invent what a round taught. Asked what an iteration proved, a model will supply a plausible design insight. Most rounds genuinely teach nothing crisp, and *(nothing conclusive)* is a real, useful answer.
  • It has to be cheap. Four questions. A log costing ten minutes a round stops after round two, and a tier nobody writes into is worse than no tier.

Instructions

Step 0 — Detect your surface

Using Bash availability:

  • Claude Code — Bash works and there's a real filesystem. Full flow, including retrieval against prior rounds.
  • Claude.ai — no filesystem. Run the interview and emit the entry as a downloadable artifact. Say plainly that retrieval is unavailable — you cannot answer "have we tried this?" without the log. Don't guess at it.

Step 1 — Resolve the explorations path (Claude Code)

In descending authority:

  1. A path declared in a CLAUDE.md protocol blockskill:design-setup's routing table row for Explorations.
  2. An existing folderdesign/explorations/, explorations/, iterations/, rounds/. Match case-insensitively.
  3. Canondesign/explorations/.

Read the full file on GitHub · 203 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 9d ago First seen · 203 lines · 126 tokens per session scan A 151c00726341

Subscribe to this mod's changes

exploration-log is a skill published in the GitHub repository vidhunnan/agentic-skills (2 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 126 tokens to every session and 2,483 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 2026-08-31.

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