dispatching-research-task

A dispatcher for Shipyard research tasks, meaning tasks that answer a technical or product question and produce a written findings document. The research may involve reading code, documentation, or web sources.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate technical choices, codebase behavior, or other questions that need documented findings. It is used by Shipyard planning and execution workflows when a decision cannot yet be specified confidently.
Why use it?
It sends question-answering work to a workflow built for investigation and evidence gathering. This avoids treating research like a coding feature, where the task could finish without producing the required findings document.

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/acendas/shipyard/dispatching-research-task
Any agent
npx skills add Acendas/shipyard --skill dispatching-research-task
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Acendas/shipyard

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 15 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,913 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 $0.00015 $0.01913
Opus 5 $0.00008 $0.00957
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00383
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00191

Measured 2d ago against content hash 3c16716a3356, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dispatching-research-task 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.

plugins/shipyard/skills/dispatching-research-task/SKILL.md · 114 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 114 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Dispatching a Research Task

Render before asking. Before any AskUserQuestion, render the decision context as assistant chat text. Content that exists only in a Read result, a subagent/Agent return, or the question/option strings does not count as rendered (the UI shows a compact card) — restate it in chat first.

A kind: research task answers a question. Its deliverable is a markdown findings doc, not code. The subagent reads (codebase, web, docs), reasons, and writes a single output file. Wrong dispatch → silent-pass bug: feature builders have no Red step for a research-shaped task and exit clean on an empty tree, satisfying the "Before Exiting" gate trivially. Route here.

When to Invoke

/ship-execute calls this skill when a task's frontmatter has kind: research. Other entry points:

  • /ship-discuss may invoke this for an inline technical investigation during feature shaping ("which JWT library should we use?").
  • /ship-sprint may invoke this during planning when a feature can't be specced without a design tradeoff analysis.

Per the action items, the routing decision (kind: feature vs operational vs research) lives in the calling command skill. This skill assumes the routing already chose research.

Inputs

  • task_id — e.g., R-013 (research tasks conventionally use R- prefix, but any ID works).
  • task_file_path — absolute path under <SHIPYARD_DATA>/spec/tasks/.
  • parent_feature_path — absolute path or null.
  • data_dir — literal <SHIPYARD_DATA> path.
  • findings_dir<SHIPYARD_DATA>/research/ (computed; the only writable area).
  • expected_findings_filename — derived from task ID + slug, e.g., R-013-jwt-library-evaluation.md.

Dispatching the Researcher

The researcher methodology (the write-scope hard gate, the reading list, the findings-doc template, when-to-stop, and the Required Return Shape) lives in the registered agent agents/shipyard-researcher.md — read it once if you need to know exactly what it does; do not re-inline it here.

Read the full file on GitHub · 114 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 · 114 lines · 15 tokens per session scan A 3c16716a3356

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dispatching-research-task is a skill published in the GitHub repository Acendas/shipyard (2 stars, last pushed 20d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 15 tokens to every session and 1,913 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.

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