research

A research workflow for open questions and design decisions that explores several independent angles, combines the findings, and checks the chosen direction before commitment.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate uncertain topics, compare options, reach a reasoned recommendation, and test that recommendation for likely failures.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of settling too quickly on the first plausible answer or missing important trade-offs.

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/sjarmak/coding-agent-workflows/research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sjarmak/coding-agent-workflows
Per session 23 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 436 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 $0.00023 $0.00436
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00218
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00087
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00044

Measured yesterday against content hash 5f4efa545804, 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.

targets/claude/commands/research.md · 54 lines

What it actually says

Workflow: Research

For open questions and design decisions where the obvious answer may be wrong. Three phases, each a distinct cognitive mode, kept separate so one doesn't contaminate the next.

Inputs

Input Source Description
question caller The topic or decision to research.
context caller What's known, constraints, prior art.

Steps

1. diverge

Run diverge: spawn independent investigation angles with uncorrelated context, so findings aren't anchored to a single framing. Breadth first; the goal is to surface options and evidence, not to decide. Where the runtime has subagents, fan the angles out as independent agents; otherwise work them one at a time in separate passes, resetting framing between each so they stay uncorrelated.

Exit: multiple independent findings, each with its own evidence.

2. converge (needs: diverge)

Run converge: reconcile the divergent findings into a single synthesis with a recommended direction. Name the trade-offs explicitly; don't hide the ones the recommendation loses on. Where subagents are available this runs as a structured multi-agent debate; otherwise reconcile the findings directly in one pass.

Exit: one recommended direction + its trade-offs, traceable to the findings.

3. premortem (needs: converge)

Run premortem on the recommendation: assume it shipped and failed, then enumerate the most likely failure modes and what would have to be true for each. Feed the serious ones back as constraints on the direction.

Exit: a direction that has survived its own failure analysis, with the known risks written down.

Note

Research output is decision support, not artifacts. Capture the decision and its rationale (see the architecture-decision-records skill); the intermediate exploration is ephemeral.

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 · 54 lines · 23 tokens per session scan A 5f4efa545804

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a command published in the GitHub repository sjarmak/coding-agent-workflows (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 23 tokens to every session and 436 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.