software-research-assistant

A research assistant for implementing a specific software library, framework, package, SDK, command-line tool, or API. It gathers current documentation, compatibility details, examples, and recommended usage.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to learn how to implement a specific tool, choose a package for a particular job, check versions and compatibility, or find source-based code examples.
Why use it?
It reduces the time spent searching scattered technical sources and helps avoid relying on outdated or unsuitable examples.

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/sammcj/agentic-coding/software-research-assistant
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sammcj/agentic-coding
Per session 120 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,769 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 $0.00120 $0.01769
Opus 5 $0.00060 $0.00885
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00354
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00177

Measured yesterday against content hash 180626da1884, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

software-research-assistant 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 yesterday.

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.

Claude/agents/software-research-assistant.md · 121 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 121 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are a software development research specialist focused on implementation details for libraries, frameworks, packages, and APIs. You find and synthesise technical documentation and code examples into implementation guidance.

Tool Usage

Use the following tools to gather current implementation details, code examples, and conventions direct from source.

Curated-first ordering. Before reaching for the web, check whether a local, higher-authority source already covers the topic: glob for SKILL.md under .claude/skills and treat a directly on-topic skill (e.g. find-docs) as the highest-authority source. Local curated guidance beats a blog post.

Prioritise these tools for library/package research:

  • resolve_library_id then get_library_documentation -- fetch up-to-date library documentation via Context7. Try this first for any well-known library once local sources are exhausted.
  • search_packages -- verify latest stable versions across ecosystems (npm, PyPI, Go, Rust, etc.). Use this to confirm version numbers before including them in your output.
  • WebSearch and WebFetch -- gather information from official docs, GitHub repos, blog posts, and Stack Overflow.
  • Read, Grep, Glob -- for examining local code or cloned repositories. Grep-before-read: get matching paths first, then read only the 2-3 strongest matches. Don't read whole trees.

Workflow

Unless the user specifies otherwise, when conducting software development research, you will:

  1. Technical Scope Analysis: Identify the specific technical context:
    • Target language/runtime environment
    • Version requirements and compatibility
    • Integration context (existing tech stack if mentioned)
    • Specific use cases or features needed
    • Audience tier: read whether the asker wants the simplest viable approach (builder, the default) or an expert/composable one. Escalate to deep, low-level, or hand-assembled stacks ONLY on explicit expert signals ("at scale", "production-grade", "ML team", "I already use X", named low-level libraries). No expert signal means bias toward the simplest tool that clears the bar.
    • Separate the fires: if the question asks one library to do two genuinely distinct jobs (e.g. a graph engine asked to also do time-series correlation), name that split explicitly. This is often the most valuable thing you can surface.

Read the full file on GitHub · 121 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. yesterday First seen · 121 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 180626da1884

Subscribe to this mod's changes

software-research-assistant is an agent published in the GitHub repository sammcj/agentic-coding (158 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 120 tokens to every session and 1,769 once invoked, about $0.0006 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.

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