autoresearch

autoresearch is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from a-tokyo/agent-skills-harness. It costs 116 tokens per session (4,744 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An autonomous loop for improving a programming task through repeated experiments. It defines a goal and measurement, changes code, runs checks, measures the result, and keeps or discards the change.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to optimize code against a measurable target, run repeated tests, record hypotheses and lessons, retain successful changes, and revert failed experiments.
Why use it?
Without a baseline and recorded measurements, iterative coding can become guesswork and make it hard to know whether a change helped. The loop keeps a structured history of each attempt.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents).

Good fit Use it to optimize code against a measurable target, run repeated tests, record hypotheses and lessons, retain successful changes, and revert failed experiments.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/a-tokyo/agent-skills-harness/autoresearch
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.

Any agent
npx skills add a-tokyo/agent-skills-harness --skill autoresearch
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/a-tokyo/agent-skills-harness

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for autoresearch

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/a-tokyo/agent-skills-harness/autoresearch/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/a-tokyo/agent-skills-harness/autoresearch)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/a-tokyo/agent-skills-harness/autoresearch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/a-tokyo/agent-skills-harness/autoresearch/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for autoresearch

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/a-tokyo/agent-skills-harness/autoresearch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/a-tokyo/agent-skills-harness/autoresearch.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 116 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,744 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00116 $0.04744
Opus 5 $0.00058 $0.02372
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00949
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00474

Measured 12d ago against content hash 67f6c4df3345, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

autoresearch 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 12d 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.

.agents/skills/autoresearch/SKILL.md · 464 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 464 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Autoresearch: Autonomous Iterative Experimentation

An autonomous experimentation loop for any programming task. You define the goal and how to measure it; the agent iterates autonomously -- modifying code, running experiments, measuring results, and keeping or discarding changes -- until interrupted.

Inspired by Karpathy's autoresearch, enhanced with battle-tested patterns from pi-autoresearch.


Agent Behavior Rules

  1. DO guide the user through the Setup phase interactively before starting the loop.
  2. DO establish a baseline measurement before making any changes.
  3. DO use the METRIC protocol for all measurements.
  4. DO keep structured logs: autoresearch.jsonl (machine) + results.tsv (human).
  5. DO record ASI fields (hypothesis, learned, rollback_reason) on every experiment.
  6. DO commit before running, revert on failure -- only kept commits remain on the branch.
  7. DO run autonomously once the loop starts -- never pause to ask "should I continue?".
  8. DO run checks (if autoresearch.checks.sh exists) before measuring.
  9. DO NOT modify files the user marked as out-of-scope.
  10. DO NOT skip the measurement step -- every experiment must be measured.
  11. DO NOT keep changes that regress the metric unless the user explicitly allowed trade-offs.
  12. DO NOT install new dependencies or make environment changes unless the user approved it.

Phase 1: Setup (Interactive)

Before any experimentation begins, work with the user to establish these parameters. Ask the user directly for each item. Do not assume or skip any.

1.1 Define the Goal

Ask the user:

What are you trying to improve or optimize?

Examples: execution time, memory usage, binary size, test pass rate, code coverage, API response latency, throughput, error rate, benchmark score, build time, bundle size, LLM output quality, prompt effectiveness, skill accuracy, etc.

Read the full file on GitHub · 464 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. 12d ago First seen · 464 lines · 116 tokens per session scan A 67f6c4df3345

Subscribe to this mod's changes

autoresearch is a skill published in the GitHub repository a-tokyo/agent-skills-harness (10 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 116 tokens to every session and 4,744 once invoked, about $0.0006 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.

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