explore-codebase

A method for understanding a large or unfamiliar codebase by having separate agents inspect different areas and then combining their summaries into one map.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to explore more than five unfamiliar files, trace a feature across modules, investigate issues spanning several areas, or understand a new dependency and its entry points.
Why use it?
Reading every file at once can overwhelm the working context and make relationships hard to track. This approach keeps the main investigation focused while still covering multiple modules.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/yologdev/yoyo-evolve/explore-codebase
Any agent
npx skills add yologdev/yoyo-evolve --skill explore-codebase
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yologdev/yoyo-evolve

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 35 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,620 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00035 $0.02620
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.01310
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00524
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00262

Measured 2d ago against content hash 08ce6a026c6c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

explore-codebase 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 2d 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/explore-codebase/SKILL.md · 209 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 209 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Explore Codebase

You are building a mental map of an unfamiliar or large codebase region. The goal is structural comprehension — understanding what the code does, how it's organized, and what the key entry points and invariants are — without loading everything into your main context window.

This skill exists because codebases are too large to read in one prompt. The pattern (Recursive Language Model — see the RLM substrate section in CLAUDE.md) is: keep your root context small, dispatch sub-agents to read individual files or modules, and have each sub-agent return a structured summary. Synthesize the summaries into a coherent map.

This skill covers any codebase the agent encounters — forks, dependencies, unfamiliar regions, user projects. For analyzing yoyo's own source to find bugs and gaps, use self-assess instead.

When to use

Trigger this skill when ANY of these hold:

  • A planned task touches >5 files you haven't recently worked on
  • A community issue references a feature or module you don't have a mental map for
  • You're investigating a bug whose surface spans multiple modules you haven't read recently
  • A new dependency is being introduced and you want to know its public API + key invariants before integrating
  • A user explicitly asks you to explore, understand, or map a codebase
  • /add brought in a large project and you need structural context before acting
  • You're working in a fork and need to understand what the fork changed relative to upstream

When NOT to use

  • Small known regions. A single file ≤300 lines, or a function you wrote yesterday — just read it directly. Sub-agent overhead exceeds the savings.
  • Precise edits across files. Refactoring needs mutual context (seeing all pieces at once), not summaries. Summaries lose the fidelity you need for surgical edits.
  • Sequential workflows with strong mutual context. When each step depends on the full output of the previous step, fan-out doesn't help — you need serial reading.
  • The region is already known. If you or the user can name the exact module and its API from memory, direct read is faster. Don't explore what you already understand.
  • You're inside a sub-agent at depth 3. Stop. Return what you have. Do not dispatch further.

Read the full file on GitHub · 209 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. 2d ago First seen · 209 lines · 35 tokens per session scan A 08ce6a026c6c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

explore-codebase is a skill published in the GitHub repository yologdev/yoyo-evolve (1,868 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 35 tokens to every session and 2,620 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 2026-08-30.

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