step-research

A research step for the Untether project, which connects coding agents and transports such as Telegram. It checks project documentation and known upstream issues before a fix is proposed.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to research runner behavior, event formats, transport details, workflow modes, and related Untether documentation before fixing a bug.
Why use it?
It reduces wasted debugging by checking whether a problem is already documented, caused by an external engine, or linked to a configuration mistake.

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/littlebearapps/untether/step-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/littlebearapps/untether

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 1,654 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 $0.01654
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00827
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00331
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00165

Measured yesterday against content hash a2a447193549, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

step-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.

.claude/commands/debug/step-research.md · 138 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 138 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Step 3 — Research

Always research before proposing a fix. The Untether bug you're chasing is often a known upstream engine quirk, a previously-fixed regression, or a documented config gotcha.

3a. Untether docs

Path What it covers
docs/reference/runners/claude/runner.md Claude Code runner spec — CLI invocation, control channel, permission modes
docs/reference/runners/claude/stream-json-cheatsheet.md Claude JSONL event shapes
docs/reference/runners/claude/untether-events.md Claude → Untether event translation rules
docs/reference/runners/codex/*.md Codex runner spec + JSONL + translation
docs/reference/runners/opencode/*.md OpenCode runner spec + JSONL + translation
docs/reference/runners/pi/*.md Pi runner spec + JSONL + translation
docs/reference/runners/gemini/*.md Gemini runner spec + JSONL + translation
docs/reference/runners/amp/*.md AMP runner spec + JSONL + translation
docs/reference/transports/telegram.md Telegram transport — Bot API client, outbox, voice, forum topics
docs/reference/modes.md Workflow modes (assistant / workspace / handoff)
docs/reference/dev-instance.md Dev vs staging service quickref + staging workflow
docs/reference/integration-testing.md Per-tier integration test playbook
.claude/rules/*.md Project rule files (auto-load on edits to matching paths)
.claude/skills/*/SKILL.md Project skills — telegram-bot-api, jsonl-subprocess-runner, claude-stream-json, codex-opencode-pi, untether-architecture, release-coordination

Read the relevant file before proposing any change. Untether docs are deliberately concrete — they contain code paths, event names, config keys.

3b. Closed Untether issues (regression detection)

SINCE=$(date -u -d '90 days ago' +%Y-%m-%d)
gh issue list --repo littlebearapps/untether \
  --search "closed:>=${SINCE}" --state closed \
  --json number,title,closedAt,labels,milestone \
  --limit 100

Read the full file on GitHub · 138 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 · 138 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A a2a447193549

Subscribe to this mod's changes

step-research is a command published in the GitHub repository littlebearapps/untether (66 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 1,654 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 2026-08-30.