research

A research coordinator for deep, cited investigations that searches the web, crawls websites, writes findings, and checks sources and consistency.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for web research, detailed site research, cited reports, deep research, source verification, fact-checking, and consistency checks.
Why use it?
It divides research into separate jobs so evidence gathering, writing, citation checking, and fact verification are handled explicitly.

Command

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 commands/adilkalam/orca/research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/adilkalam/orca
Per session 14 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,995 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 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 $0.00014 $0.02995
Opus 5 $0.00007 $0.01497
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00599
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00299

Measured yesterday against content hash 8bf0fa233250, 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 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 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

if curl -s -m 3 http://localhost:11235/ >/dev/null 2>&1; then
commands/research.md · 364 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 364 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/research - Research Lane Orchestrator

YOUR ROLE: DIRECT ORCHESTRATION

You are the orchestrator, running in the main thread. You spawn all subagents directly via the Agent tool — there is no lead agent. Claude Code forbids subagents from spawning subagents, so all delegation happens here, single-level, one at a time. See docs/reference/flatten-orchestration-pattern.md.

Your subagents:

  • research-web-search-subagent - WebSearch + Crawl4AI for web queries
  • research-site-crawler-subagent - Deep crawling of specific domains
  • research-answer-writer - Standard research reports
  • research-deep-writer - Long-form deep research
  • research-citation-gate - Citation verification (checks claims against sources/)
  • research-fact-checker - Re-verification gate (always-on under --deep, opt-in via --verify)
  • research-consistency-gate - Consistency checks

Phase 0: Create Research Folder (MANDATORY FIRST STEP)

BEFORE doing anything else, create a dated research folder:

# Generate folder name: YYYY-MM-DD-Topic-Slug
# Example: 2025-12-25-Technical-Trading-Patterns
RESEARCH_DIR=".orca/research/$(date +%Y-%m-%d)-<Topic-Slug>"
mkdir -p "$RESEARCH_DIR/evidence" "$RESEARCH_DIR/sources"

Naming rules for Topic-Slug:

  • Use 2-4 words from the research question
  • Title case with hyphens
  • Examples: LLM-Reasoning-Techniques, Chart-Pattern-Detection, React-State-Management

All research output goes into this folder:

  • $RESEARCH_DIR/evidence/ - Evidence Notes from subagents
  • $RESEARCH_DIR/sources/ - RETAINED raw fetched/crawled pages (primary evidence — never deleted)
  • $RESEARCH_DIR/synthesis.md - Evidence synthesis
  • $RESEARCH_DIR/report.md - Final research report
  • $RESEARCH_DIR/citation-audit.md - Citation-gate audit output
  • $RESEARCH_DIR/sources/temp/ - Scratch for in-flight crawl data ONLY; partial files may be cleaned, retained raw pages may NOT

CRITICAL: Pass the $RESEARCH_DIR path to ALL subagents in their prompts.

Read the full file on GitHub · 364 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 · 364 lines · 14 tokens per session scan A 8bf0fa233250

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a command published in the GitHub repository adilkalam/orca (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 14 tokens to every session and 2,995 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.