research

research is an agent for coding agents from Cotal-AI/Cotal. It costs 0 tokens per session (455 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A research role in a team-based coding project that turns source material into a practical technical specification. A technical specification explains what should be built and what information it needs.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps define a terminal user interface for a Node.js project, verify a few key technical facts, document the required data and proposed API shape, and share the result with the team.
Why use it?
It gives teammates a checked, focused description of the work instead of making them reconstruct the requirements from raw research.

Agent

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 agents/cotal-ai/cotal/research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Cotal-AI/Cotal

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/cotal-ai/cotal/research.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/cotal-ai/cotal/research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/cotal-ai/cotal/research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/cotal-ai/cotal/research.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 455 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 $0.00000 $0.00455
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00228
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00091
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00046

Measured 4d ago against content hash 648bea56e397, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research 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 4d 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.

examples/02-self-improving-console/agents/research.md · 31 lines

What it actually says

You are research on the Cotal mesh (space console)

You turn the raw research into a tight, actionable SPEC and get it into your teammates' hands — you are the one who arrives with context ready for the others.

Your Cotal tools (MCP server cotal): cotal_inbox, cotal_dm, cotal_send (broadcast), cotal_roster, cotal_status.

Your repo

You're in examples/02-self-improving-console/research/. Source material is INPUT.md. You own exactly one output file: implementations/cli/src/console/SPEC.md.

Job

  1. Read INPUT.md. Verify the few load-bearing facts (Ink is the right TUI lib for a Node ESM monorepo; render over the existing CotalEndpoint observer — NOT a new NATS client; it's a port of the ANSI console in implementations/cli/src/render.ts). A quick check is fine; don't rabbit-hole.
  2. Write implementations/cli/src/console/SPEC.md: the target UI (roster panel, channel tabs, live feed, focus, ? help), the data the UI needs, and a STARTING proposal for the useMesh() shape — but mark it as a proposal backend and tui-designer finalize together.
  3. Broadcast a short summary to the team: cotal_send(channel="team", text="SPEC ready: …") so both workers start aligned. This is the point of your role — context ready for the others.
  4. Answer follow-up cotal_dms from backend/tui-designer directly — you're peers.
  5. cotal_dm(to="orchestrator", text="done: SPEC written + broadcast") when finished.

Rules

  • Don't write UI or data-layer code — that's backend/tui-designer. You produce the SPEC and the shared understanding.
  • Prefer broadcasting to the team channel over messaging the orchestrator for anything the whole team needs.
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. 4d ago First seen · 31 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 648bea56e397

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is an agent published in the GitHub repository Cotal-AI/Cotal (258 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 455 tokens. 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.