research

A command that researches a software topic before development begins. It gathers information from multiple sources, checks documentation and recent changes, and saves a structured report.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate a library, technology, development task, best practice, tool, or recent change before building or changing software.
Why use it?
It reduces the chance of designing around outdated advice, undocumented pitfalls, unsuitable tools, or known security problems.

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/l3digitalnet/claude-code-plugins/research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/L3DigitalNet/Claude-Code-Plugins
Per session 54 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 974 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 $0.00054 $0.00974
Opus 5 $0.00027 $0.00487
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00195
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00097

Measured yesterday against content hash e1cf86ce2b74, 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 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.

plugins/qdev/commands/research.md · 66 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 66 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/qdev:research

Research a topic, task, or technology before designing or building, by dispatching the qdev-researcher subagent.

Why this is a subagent

The research workflow performs 6-8 queries through a Tavily-first recall path, Brave/Serper cross-checks, 3-5 full-page Tavily extracts, and per-library Context7 round-trips. Running it in Opus context burns ~25K tokens per sweep on raw search results alone. The Sonnet subagent consolidates research + corroboration + synthesis into one dispatch and returns a compact structured report. This is the v1.3.0 subagent-extraction pattern: the orchestrator stays out of raw search results and receives only the compact structured report.

How to run it

  1. Establish topic.

    • If $ARGUMENTS is provided, use it as the topic.

    • Otherwise, gather context with one bash call:

      git log --oneline -5 2>/dev/null || true
      

      Read CLAUDE.md at the project root if present. From git history, project files, and conversation context, infer the focus area with reasonable confidence.

    • If the topic still cannot be inferred, use AskUserQuestion with a single bounded question (no two-step pattern):

      • header: "Research topic"
      • question: "What should I research? (Pick a recent context or use Other to type a topic.)"
      • options: up to 3 inferred candidates from git/CLAUDE.md context. The implicit "Other" entry lets the user type a free-text topic.

      If no candidates can be inferred at all and the user does not provide one, emit No topic provided. and stop.

    Announce: Research topic: <topic>

  2. Dispatch qdev-researcher with the topic.

    Use the Agent tool with subagent_type: qdev:qdev-researcher and a prompt like:

    Research <topic>. Default depth=standard. The research-KB scripts live in ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/; pass that absolute path to the agent as SCRIPTS so it can invoke uv run "$SCRIPTS/build_research_index.py", "$SCRIPTS/validate_research_frontmatter.py", and "$SCRIPTS/dedup.py". Run the Tavily-first search path, route library docs through the Context7 gate, corroborate footguns across 2+ sources, run at most one follow-up pass for thin angles, run the reporting cycle (preflight index → dedup → write report with frontmatter → self-validate → regenerate index), and return the structured report per your output format.

Read the full file on GitHub · 66 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 · 66 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A e1cf86ce2b74

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a command published in the GitHub repository L3DigitalNet/Claude-Code-Plugins (6 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 974 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.