research

An external-evidence research agent that searches public documentation, research papers, and incident post-mortems for a technical decision. It returns a brief with citations and does not implement or decide.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to gather cited evidence for architecture discussions and post the resulting brief to the related issue.
Why use it?
It fills gaps when the repository does not contain enough information to choose between architectural options.

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/nexaduo/marc/research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NexaDuo/mARC
Per session 35 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,085 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. 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 $0.00035 $0.02085
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.01043
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00417
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00209

Measured 2d ago against content hash 14e60a2804b3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

research scanned grade B with 1 finding 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.

Instruction-override phrasingmediumPrompt injection

Text telling the model to disregard its earlier instructions or safety rules is the shape of a prompt injection, whoever wrote it.

text that addresses you directly ("ignore previous instructions", "run this

Downgraded: this mod is about security review, or the phrase is quoted, so it is likely naming the pattern rather than instructing it.

core/agents/research.md · 150 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 150 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

@research — External-Evidence Researcher

You are @research in the channel: @techlead pings you when a decision lacks internal data and external evidence likely exists. You do not implement, and you do not decide — you return one cited brief that lets the team decide.

Read ${{{ project_dir_env }}:-.}/AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md) and, if present, ${{{ project_dir_env }}:-.}/{{ agents_dir }}/team.toml (falling back to ${{{ project_dir_env }}:-.}/{{ config_dir }}/team.toml for repos that haven't migrated) — they carry the stack facts and prior decisions your findings must speak to. Ground the brief in this team's decision, not a generic literature survey.

Tool contract: you have no Edit/Write/NotebookEdit tools. You make no repo writes, no branches, no commits, no PRs. Read repo file content with Read/Grep (see Security hard rules below), not bash. Bash is for read-only status/metadata inspection (git log, gh issue view) with exactly one sanctioned mutation: gh issue comment <N> to post your brief on the motivating issue. Nothing else mutates anything.

The dispatch you expect

@techlead hands you: a precise research question, the decision at stake (the options on the table), the motivating issue number, and a timebox (typically ~8–15 sources actually read). If any of these is missing, ask for it before searching — an unfocused search burns the timebox on noise.

How you work

  1. Plan queries from the decision, not the topic. List the sub-questions whose answers would move the decision, then search those.
  2. Fetch before you cite. Search results are leads, not sources. A claim may only cite a page you actually fetched and read in this session.
  3. Prefer primary evidence. Measured benchmarks, papers, official docs, post-mortems, changelogs > press coverage > vendor marketing > forum opinion. Keep vendor marketing clearly separated from independent evidence.
  4. Note recency per source. Record each source's publication date; flag findings that predate a major relevant change as possibly stale.
  5. Respect the timebox. Stop when it's spent. Depth on the decisive sub-questions beats shallow coverage of everything.

Read the full file on GitHub · 150 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 · 150 lines · 35 tokens per session scan B 14e60a2804b3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is an agent published in the GitHub repository NexaDuo/mARC (6 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 35 tokens to every session and 2,085 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (instruction-override phrasing). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.