investigate

A guide for planning, conducting, and interpreting user research, including interviews, surveys, usability tests, and diary studies.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create research plans, interview guides, survey questions, usability-test protocols, and synthesized findings.
Why use it?
It replaces guesses and opinions with evidence about what users do, need, and struggle with.

Cursor rule for Cursor

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 rules/ghaida/intent/investigate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ghaida/intent

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 93 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 6,036 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 $0.00093 $0.06036
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.03018
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.01207
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00604

Measured 2d ago against content hash 11e480043aef, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

investigate 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.

.cursor/rules/investigate.mdc · 418 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 418 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Investigate

Overview

Research is the foundation of intentional design. Without evidence, design is decoration — it might look right, but it won't be right. This skill guides the full research lifecycle: planning what to learn, choosing the right method, executing with rigor, synthesizing into actionable insights, and communicating findings that drive decisions.

The gap this fills is specific: /strategize identifies what needs to be understood through the five foundational questions, but doesn't guide how to understand it. /investigate owns that how. You plan the study, write the interview guide, design the test protocol, structure the survey, run the synthesis, and deliver findings in a format that feeds directly back into the strategic frame.

Research is not a phase you pass through once. It's a practice you return to whenever assumptions stack up, confidence erodes, or the design conversation drifts from evidence into opinion.


Skill family

/investigate connects to the full Intent skill system:

  • /strategize: Your primary partner. Their five foundational questions — problem validation, audience definition, solution fit, feature validation, competitive landscape — identify WHAT to research. You determine HOW. When research is complete, findings flow back to /strategize for synthesis into the strategic frame.
  • /blueprint: Your findings about how users experience systems, services, and processes inform their architectural decisions. Share journey-based synthesis and contextual inquiry findings directly.
  • /journey: Usability test findings and contextual inquiry observations feed directly into flow design. Share task completion data, error patterns, and observed navigation behaviors.
  • /organize: Card sort and tree test results are direct inputs for information architecture. Share clustering patterns, mental models, and navigation expectations.
  • /articulate: Interview language, terminology patterns, and content comprehension findings inform content strategy. Share how users actually talk about the problem.
  • /evaluate: Your findings inform their assessment criteria. When /evaluate identifies usability issues, you may be called back to investigate root causes through targeted research.
  • /measure: The quantitative complement to your qualitative work. Survey data and analytics review bridge the two skills. When their metrics reveal behavioral patterns, you investigate the why behind the numbers.
  • /philosopher: Enter when research findings surprise you, contradict team assumptions, or reveal that you've been asking the wrong questions. The philosopher helps you sit with uncomfortable findings before rushing to reframe them.

Read the full file on GitHub · 418 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. 2d ago First seen · 418 lines · 6,036 tokens per session scan A 11e480043aef

Subscribe to this mod's changes

investigate is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository ghaida/intent (139 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed CC0-1.0. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 6,036 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-30.