research

A command for researching a development task and recording a structured assessment in the project’s issue tracker. It reads the task, project guidance, and relevant code context before development begins.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it with an issue or ticket that has a description. It can inspect GitHub or JIRA tasks, read project context, and stop when the issue is missing a description or already contains research findings.
Why use it?
It helps reveal the likely impact of a change and preserves the findings where the development work is tracked.

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/xsovad06/sova/research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/xsovad06/sova

Made for: Claude Code.

Per session 16 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,390 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 $0.00016 $0.01390
Opus 5 $0.00008 $0.00695
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00278
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00139

Measured yesterday against content hash 18b0c79685ea, 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.

.claude/commands/research.md · 169 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 169 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research

Investigate a task's codebase impact and produce a structured research assessment. Designed for autonomous execution -- always writes findings back to the tracker. For interactive pre-development planning, use /spec instead.

Task: $ARGUMENTS

Instructions

Step 1: Fetch the Task

Get the issue number or ticket key from $ARGUMENTS. If empty, stop with an error.

Determine the task source by reading sova.toml (if it exists) and checking [task_source] type.

GitHub (default, or no sova.toml):

gh issue view $ARGUMENTS --json number,title,body,labels,milestone

JIRA (task_source.type = "jira"):

jira issue view $ARGUMENTS --plain

Save the original description verbatim.

If the issue has no description or body, report "Issue has no description; needs specification before research" and stop.

If the issue body already contains a ## Research section, report "Issue already has a research section; ready for development" and stop.

Step 2: Read Project Context

Read whatever exists -- skip files that are missing:

  • CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md for project conventions
  • .claude/rules/architecture.md for component overview and design decisions
  • .claude/agent-memory/cookbook.md for known patterns and past mistakes

Step 3: Explore the Codebase

Based on the issue, investigate the affected areas. Use file reads, grep, and search -- do not guess from file names alone.

  1. Identify affected files: find every file that needs to be modified, created, or deleted. Read the actual source to confirm.
  2. Find the pattern: locate the closest existing implementation to follow. Note specific file paths, class names, and method signatures.
  3. Check for data model changes: determine if DB models, schemas, or migrations are needed.
  4. Check for API changes: identify new or modified endpoints with request/response shapes.
  5. Find reusable code: identify utilities, base classes, test fixtures, and patterns that the implementation should use. Reference specific functions and classes.
  6. Anticipate edge cases: based on reading the actual code, identify failure modes and edge cases not obvious from the issue description.
  7. Check for UI implications: templates, components, user-facing behavior changes.
  8. Design implementation approach: produce a concrete 3-6 step plan referencing specific files.

Read the full file on GitHub · 169 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 · 169 lines · 16 tokens per session scan A 18b0c79685ea

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a command published in the GitHub repository xsovad06/sova (2 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 16 tokens to every session and 1,390 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.