Tool
explain
Delegate the understanding. explain reads widely inside the scope you give it, synthesises, and reports back with citations — so you get comprehension rather than raw text. Fire several in parallel across different areas when you are mapping something large.
You ask your agent “which of our capabilities need the cloud, and which work fully offline?” — this is what it sends. The same operation is a shell command, which is the form you script against.
Your agent calls — mcp
You call — cli
What comes back — the same on both surfaces
A minute and a half of reading, delegated — dozens of files consumed so the answer could be
thirty lines. The <Nuance> section is where the surprises live: the cliffs and caveats
the code has that nobody wrote down. --json emits the whole thing structured.
Parameters
| Parameter | What it does | |
|---|---|---|
| question | required | What you want answered. Full sentences work best. |
| keywords | required | The symbols, files, or terms-of-art to focus on. You almost always know these better than they can be inferred. |
| uriGlob | optional | Scope. Always set it — an unscoped explain will confidently answer a different question than the one you meant. |
| tokenBudget | optional | Room for the synthesised answer. It does not limit how much source gets read. |
Good questions and bad ones
It rewards a scoped question with a real subject: how does JWT refresh work in AuthService, why does the payment processor use idempotency keys, what happens when an item is indexed, step by step. It does poorly with explain everything about authentication, or what does this service do with no scope — there is no way for it to know which half you meant.
Verify what matters
Every claim carries a citation for a reason. When the stakes are high, follow one back with
read and check it against the code.
This page names what exists. The depth behind every name ships inside the binary at help:///: the bounds, the failure modes, how they compose. It answers to explore and read exactly like your code does. Install it, and your agent has the manual.