how

How — a Cursor skill for explaining codebases

A Cursor plugin that adds the /how skill: ask how a subsystem, feature, or flow works, and the agent produces a clear architectural explanation at the level of a senior engineer onboarding onto a new area.

What it does

Two modes, picked automatically from your question:

• Explain (default) — explore the codebase and produce a structured explanation with sections for Overview, Key Concepts, How It Works, Where Things Live, and Gotchas.
• Critique — explain first, then spawn multiple independent critics across different models to surface architectural problems.

For complex questions that span multiple files or services, the skill decomposes the question into 2–4 parallel exploration angles and spawns explorer subagents that gather findings in parallel. A synthesis agent then reconciles their findings into a single coherent explanation. Simple questions skip the fan-out and run end-to-end in a single agent.

Example prompts

• "How does message virtualization work?"
• "Walk me through what happens when a user sends a message"
• "How is the auth service structured? Also critique the design."
• "How does the auth middleware check permissions?"

Structure

how/
├── .cursor-plugin/
│   └── plugin.json
└── skills/
    └── how/
        ├── SKILL.md
        └── references/
            ├── explainer-prompt.md
            ├── explorer-prompt.md
            ├── critic-prompt.md
            └── critique-rubric.md

SKILL.md contains the top-level routing logic (simple vs. complex, explain vs. critique). The references/ folder holds the prompt templates that the agent hands to each subagent, plus the critique rubric used during the critique pass.

License

MIT