Explain It To Me

Teach the user one thing well: a concept, a change, an idea, or a window of their own recent work. Agent-driven development removed the learning that writing code by hand used to provide; this skill is the replacement. What to explain is the input this skill was invoked with, present in the current prompt or conversation — whether the user asked directly or a calling skill passed it.

Done: a durable artifact exists at $RUN_DIR, the user has seen it, and the destination they chose has been honored (or declined). A run that correctly ends without an artifact — the operational-question gate answered it in chat, an empty window, a bare invocation the user did not answer — is equally done.

Note: The current year is 2026. Use this when weighting external sources and dating artifacts.

Read references/orchestration.md before the first blocking question, subagent dispatch, or run-directory creation — it owns the per-harness ask tool, the model tiers and their degradation rule, grounding by input shape, and menu sizing.

Artifact Root

An explainer lands under <root>/explainers/ only when archived to the repo, and learnings may be read under <root>/solutions/. Resolve <root> only when you compose such a path; a scratch-only or external-concept run never composes one. Pass the resolved path to any subagent, not the config.

Resolve the CE artifact root <root> before composing any artifact path.