research

A repeatable workflow for researching an open question by clarifying it, splitting it into smaller parts, searching for evidence, and combining the findings.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate options, compare tools or approaches, answer technical questions, and produce a sourced summary.
Why use it?
It reduces wasted searches and unsupported conclusions by requiring clear goals, source links, immediate summaries, and checks for how many sources support each finding.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/5uck1ess/devkit/research
Any agent
npx skills add 5uck1ess/devkit --skill research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/5uck1ess/devkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 193 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 381 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 $0.00193 $0.00381
Opus 5 $0.00097 $0.00191
Sonnet 5 $0.00039 $0.00076
Haiku 4.5 $0.00019 $0.00038

Measured yesterday against content hash 75f00094ddf1, 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.

skills/research/SKILL.md · 26 lines

What it actually says

Research

Deterministic research workflow: clarify → decompose → parallel search → summarize → follow-up → synthesize.

Invoke

Start the workflow via the devkit engine:

Use the devkit_start tool with workflow: "research" and input: "{input}".

Then follow each step the engine returns. Call devkit_advance after completing each step. The engine controls step order, gates, and loops. Do NOT skip steps.

Rules

  • Clarify before searching — don't waste searches on a vague question
  • Decompose with explicit goals — no vague "broad search"
  • Summarize immediately — never carry raw fetched content forward
  • Track corroboration — every claim notes how many sources support it
  • Cite sources — every finding links to where it came from
  • Escalate when warranted — ask the user, never auto-escalate
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 · 26 lines · 193 tokens per session scan A 75f00094ddf1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a skill published in the GitHub repository 5uck1ess/devkit (5 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 193 tokens to every session and 381 once invoked, about $0.0010 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories