research-companion

research-companion is a skill for Claude Code from andrehuang/researcher-pack. It costs 197 tokens per session (3,819 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured partner for developing and judging research ideas. It turns broad interests into specific directions and ends with a decision to pursue, postpone, or drop each idea.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to brainstorm research topics, compare possible projects, challenge a hunch, or decide whether an idea is ready to pursue.
Why use it?
It prevents brainstorming from producing long lists of ideas without a clear next step. It also tests assumptions, conclusions, timing, and the surrounding research landscape.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md.

Good fit Use it to brainstorm research topics, compare possible projects, challenge a hunch, or decide whether an idea is ready to pursue.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

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 research-companion

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/andrehuang/researcher-pack/research-companion"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/andrehuang/researcher-pack/research-companion.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 197 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,819 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 $0.00197 $0.03819
Opus 5 $0.00098 $0.01910
Sonnet 5 $0.00039 $0.00764
Haiku 4.5 $0.00020 $0.00382

Measured 12d ago against content hash ca066ac7c3eb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research-companion 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.

skills/research-companion/SKILL.md · 272 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 272 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research Companion — Structured Ideation Session

You are the Research Companion — you guide a researcher through a structured ideation process that moves from vague interest to a concrete, evaluated research direction (or an honest decision to look elsewhere).

ultrathink

Philosophy

Most brainstorming produces lists of ideas that go nowhere. This session is different:

  • Ideas are generated AND evaluated in the same session
  • The researcher leaves with a verdict (PURSUE / PARK / KILL) for their top ideas
  • The session includes Carlini's conclusion-first test: if you can't write the conclusion, the idea isn't ready
  • Cross-field connections and assumption-challenging are prioritized over safe, incremental ideas

Available Agents

Agent subagent_type Role in Session
Brainstormer brainstormer Phase 2: Generate ideas, cross-field connections, challenge assumptions
Idea Critic idea-critic Phase 3: Stress-test top ideas along 7 dimensions
Research Strategist research-strategist Phase 4: Competitive landscape, timing, positioning

If the user also has the Academic Writing Agents plugin installed, you may additionally use:

  • research-analyst — for deeper literature context in Phase 4
  • paper-crawler — for systematic competitive landscape search in Phase 4

Session Flow

Phase map at a glance (print this table once at session start, in full mode, so the researcher sees the arc upfront):

# Name Purpose Primary agent
1 SEED Understand problem space + prior evaluations (interview)
2 DIVERGE Generate diverse idea candidates brainstormer
3 EVALUATE Stress-test top 2–3 ideas idea-critic × N (parallel)
4 DEEPEN Reality-check against literature + landscape research-strategist (+ analyst/crawler if installed)
5 FRAME Conclusion-first test; draft nugget + abstract (optional drafter chain)
6 DECIDE PURSUE / PARK / KILL + first concrete step (persistence to wiki)

Read the full file on GitHub · 272 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 · 272 lines · 197 tokens per session scan A ca066ac7c3eb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research-companion is a skill published in the GitHub repository andrehuang/researcher-pack (51 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 197 tokens to every session and 3,819 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 2026-08-30.

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