Agent Skill

Ethos Explore skill

ethos-exploreNVIDIA/skillsskills/ethos-explore/SKILL.md

Captures what an AI agent is supposed to do — its purpose, boundaries, and success criteria — as a durable snapshot for anyone building, evaluating, reviewing, or changing it. Explores the user's codebase and docs first, then asks one intent question at a time for what source cannot supply. Hands its answers to ethos-write, which writes ethos.md. Use over generic brainstorming when the goal is an agent's ethos.md.

3.7kApache-2.0

always on

91 tokname + description

once used

5,901 tokSKILL.md body

bundled files

723 KB

repo stars

3.7kGitHub

Install the Ethos Explore skill

Skills CLI (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others)

npx skills add https://github.com/NVIDIA/skills --skill ethos-explore

Claude Code, by hand (all projects)

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NVIDIA/skills.git /tmp/skills
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -R /tmp/skills/skills/ethos-explore ~/.claude/skills/ethos-explore

For one project only, copy the folder into .claude/skills/ in that project instead. The agent picks it up when a task matches its description.

What it costs your context

Agent Skills load in three steps. Tokens counted with the o200k tokenizer; your model's count will differ a little.

When	What loads	Cost
Every session	Name and description	91 tok
When the agent uses it	The SKILL.md instructions	5,901 tok
Only if opened	7 bundled files (23 KB)	varies

Until it is used, ethos-explore costs about 15× less than the median MCP server we measured (1,363 tokens on every turn). Installing all 150 skills from NVIDIA/skills would load 20,796 tokens of descriptions. Skills vs MCP study

Checks

The instructions are over 5,000 tokens, the Agent Skills specification's guideline for SKILL.md.

Pre-approved tools (allowed-tools): Read, Glob, Grep, Bash. The agent can use these without asking while the skill is active.

Checked 2026-10-22 · method

What's inside

The headings of its SKILL.md. Read the full file on GitHub.

Explore an agent's intended behavior
The schema you are filling
Pre-flight
Step 1 — Explore the codebase
Step 2 — Ask intent questions
What to ask
Always ask these three
How to ask
Red flags — stop and ask
Step 3 — Present the draft ethos.md
Step 4 — Hand off
If the user pushes back
Gotchas

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