research

An optional research phase that collects durable knowledge about a specialised domain for a later plan or synthesis step. It checks existing project knowledge before gathering new sources.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when a module depends on unfamiliar domain expertise and the findings need to be saved for reuse.
Why use it?
It prevents teams from planning with missing domain information or repeating research they already have.

Command for Claude Code

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/aidemd-mcp/server/research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aidemd-mcp/server

Made for: Claude Code.

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 386 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 $0.00386
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00193
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00077
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00039

Measured 2d ago against content hash e530b8fbacbb, 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.

.claude/commands/aide/research.md · 22 lines

What it actually says

/aide:research — Research Phase (Optional)

Agent: This command is executed by the aide-domain-expert agent.

Fill the brain with durable domain knowledge the synthesizer can later draw from. Run this phase only when the module requires domain expertise the team does not already have — skip it when the domain is already understood.

Checklist

  • Confirm research is actually needed. If the user or the brain already has the domain knowledge, stop and go directly to /aide:synthesize
  • Identify the domain being researched — name it specifically enough that the brain can file the output under a stable topic
  • Check the brain first for existing research on the topic. If coverage is already sufficient, stop — do not re-fetch what the brain already holds
  • Gather sources: existing brain entries, transcripts, external articles, web search, MCP memory stores
  • Synthesize findings and persist them to the brain filed by domain (e.g., research/email-marketing/, research/local-seo/), not by project. Domain knowledge is reusable across projects
  • If no external brain is available, write findings to a co-located research.aide file next to the intent spec as a fallback. This is not ideal — recommend enabling an external memory store
  • Each persisted entry should include:
    • Sources with ratings and dates
    • Data points with attribution
    • Patterns observed across sources
    • Conflicts resolved (where sources disagreed, which direction chosen and why)
  • Stop when coverage is sufficient for the synthesizer to fill the .aide body sections, not when all sources are exhausted
  • Hand off to /aide:synthesize — the strategist (fresh session) will read your research and fill the spec's body sections
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 · 22 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A e530b8fbacbb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a command published in the GitHub repository aidemd-mcp/server (3 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 386 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 2026-08-31.