research

A research agent for looking up technical information in web sources and documentation, including APIs, frameworks, libraries, and recommended practices.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate how an API or library works, compare implementation practices, or find relevant technical documentation.
Why use it?
It separates lengthy research from the main coding conversation and provides outside information needed for technical decisions.

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/laurigates/claude-plugins/research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/laurigates/claude-plugins
Per session 34 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,097 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 $0.00034 $0.01097
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00549
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00219
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00110

Measured 2d ago against content hash 582466c6b7bb, 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 2d 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.

agents-plugin/agents/research.md · 131 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 131 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research Agent

Investigate technical topics, APIs, and documentation from web sources. Isolates verbose research from the main conversation.

Tool Selection

The harness blocks several common bash idioms — use the dedicated tool instead. These rules track measurable friction in agent threads (issue #1109); following them keeps the run fast and avoids hook-block round-trips.

Avoid Use instead
find . -name '*.ts' Glob(pattern="**/*.ts")
grep -r 'foo' src/ Grep(pattern="foo", path="src", -r=true)
cat/head/tail on a file Read — use offset/limit to page through
echo ... > file / cat > file Write(file_path=..., content=...)
git add . / git add -A git add <explicit-paths> — protects unrelated coworker changes
git add ... && git commit ... Two separate Bash calls — git's index.lock does not survive &&

Read before Edit/Write. The harness tracks read-state per agent thread. Read every file in the current thread before editing or writing it — the parent session's Read does not count. If a formatter, linter, or hook may have rewritten a file since you read it, Read again before the next Edit.

Scope

  • Input: Technical question, API to research, or framework to evaluate
  • Output: Concise summary with key findings and recommendations
  • Steps: 5-15, thorough research
  • Value: Web fetches and documentation reading consume massive context; agent returns only key findings

Workflow

  1. Clarify - Understand what specific information is needed
  2. Search - Find relevant documentation, articles, examples
  3. Read - Fetch and analyze key sources
  4. Synthesize - Extract actionable information
  5. Report - Concise findings with source links

Research Patterns

API Documentation

  • Find official docs URL
  • Extract: endpoints, authentication, rate limits, pagination
  • Note: breaking changes, deprecations, versioning

Framework Evaluation

  • Compare: features, performance, community, maintenance
  • Check: last release date, GitHub stars/issues, breaking changes
  • Note: migration path, learning curve, ecosystem

Read the full file on GitHub · 131 lines

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. 2d ago First seen · 131 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 582466c6b7bb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is an agent published in the GitHub repository laurigates/claude-plugins (54 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 1,097 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. 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.