autonomous-researcher

autonomous-researcher is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from aaronnat23/disp8ch. It costs 0 tokens per session (466 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured research guide covering topic scoping, literature review, synthesis, hypothesis formation, optional experiments, and written reporting. It searches sources such as arXiv and Semantic Scholar, which publish and index research papers.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for literature reviews, research reports, hypothesis evaluation, and optional empirical validation through implementation and benchmarking.
Why use it?
It turns a broad research question into smaller questions and keeps sources, competing explanations, evidence, and knowledge gaps organized.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it for literature reviews, research reports, hypothesis evaluation, and optional empirical validation through implementation and benchmarking.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/aaronnat23/disp8ch/autonomous-researcher
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 aaronnat23/disp8ch --skill autonomous-researcher
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aaronnat23/disp8ch

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 autonomous-researcher

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aaronnat23/disp8ch/autonomous-researcher/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aaronnat23/disp8ch/autonomous-researcher)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aaronnat23/disp8ch/autonomous-researcher"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aaronnat23/disp8ch/autonomous-researcher/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 autonomous-researcher

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aaronnat23/disp8ch/autonomous-researcher"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aaronnat23/disp8ch/autonomous-researcher.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 466 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 26
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 27
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00000 $0.00466
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00233
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00093
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00047

Measured 7d ago against content hash a8de55cafd76, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

autonomous-researcher 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 7d 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.

skills/autonomous-researcher/SKILL.md · 29 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 29 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Autonomous Researcher

End-to-end research pipeline: scoping, literature review, hypothesis formation, synthesis, empirical validation, and written output.

Research Pipeline

  • Phase 1 — Scope: Decompose the research topic into 3–5 specific sub-questions before starting any search.
  • Phase 2 — Literature: Search arXiv, Semantic Scholar, and web sources. Screen for relevance. Target 10–20 sources for a thorough review.
  • Phase 3 — Synthesis: Cluster findings by theme. Identify consensus positions, open debates, and knowledge gaps.
  • Phase 4 — Hypothesis: Propose 2–3 candidate hypotheses that address a gap. Evaluate feasibility and novelty.
  • Phase 5 — Validation (optional): Use the Experiment Loop skill to empirically validate the winning hypothesis — implement, benchmark, keep/discard via git.
  • Phase 6 — Output: Write a structured report with: Abstract, Background, Findings, Hypothesis, Experimental Results, Next Steps, References.

Rules

  • Use the council node or parallel agents to run competing hypothesis evaluations when multiple stances are plausible.
  • Store all intermediate findings in memory with appropriate types (fact, event, profile) so subsequent runs can build on prior work.
  • Quality gates: after literature review, verify ≥5 sources found before continuing. After synthesis, verify hypothesis addresses a real gap.
  • Cite every factual claim. Use inline references [Author, Year] throughout the report body.
  • Produce a final paper_draft.md artifact saved via write_file to data/workspace/reports/.
  • When the hypothesis involves code changes or performance optimization, combine with the Experiment Loop skill to move from theory to empirical proof.

API Sources

  • arXiv: https://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query={{topic}}&max_results=10
  • Semantic Scholar: https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/search?query={{topic}}&limit=10&fields=title,abstract,authors,year
  • CrossRef: https://api.crossref.org/works?query={{topic}}&rows=10
  • DuckDuckGo: use web_search tool for general/current web sources

Read the full file on GitHub · 29 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. 7d ago First seen · 29 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A a8de55cafd76

Subscribe to this mod's changes

autonomous-researcher is a skill published in the GitHub repository aaronnat23/disp8ch (100 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 466 tokens. 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 2026-09-03.

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