What is survey-snowball?

A research skill that follows citation links from one or more seed papers to map related academic work. It searches backward through references and forward through papers that cite them, then creates evidence cards and a three-part review.

Investigating a research topic from seed papers, filtering related studies, collecting abstracts, summarising evidence, and selecting must-read papers.

It helps trace how an idea has developed and assess prior work, feasibility, and possible breakthroughs.

survey-snowball — Skill for Claude Code by andyhan12138

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 andyhan12138/AILiteratureTools --skill survey-snowball

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/andyhan12138/AILiteratureTools

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/andyhan12138/ailiteraturetools/survey-snowball/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/andyhan12138/ailiteraturetools/survey-snowball)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/andyhan12138/ailiteraturetools/survey-snowball"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/andyhan12138/ailiteraturetools/survey-snowball/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/andyhan12138/ailiteraturetools/survey-snowball"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/andyhan12138/ailiteraturetools/survey-snowball.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 260 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,666 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 unknown 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00260	$0.01666
Opus 5.5	$0.00104	$0.00666
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00052	$0.00333
Haiku 4.5	$0.00026	$0.00167

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 3f09a15ef2e1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

survey-snowball 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 2mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 6 executable files (scripts/build_graph.py, scripts/make_cards.py, scripts/score_titles.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/survey-snowball/SKILL.md · 65 lines

The source is not reproduced here

No licence file

Read it on GitHub

Files

What ships with it

9 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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.

2mo ago First seen · 65 lines · 260 tokens per session scan A 3f09a15ef2e1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

survey-snowball is a skill published in the GitHub repository andyhan12138/AILiteratureTools (5 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), with no licence file. It adds 260 tokens to every session and 1,666 once invoked, about $0.0010 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.

Research Scientific

survey-snowball next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
survey-snowballandyhan12138/AILiteratureTools	Skill	5	4mo ago	none	A	260	Claude Code
instrument-data-to-allotropeanthropics/knowledge-work-plugins	Skill	35k	2d ago	Apache-2.0	A	123	Claude Code
exploratory-data-analysisK-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills	Skill	56k	4d ago	MIT	A	83	Claude Code
matlabK-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills	Skill	56k	4d ago	MIT	A	44	Claude Code
phylogeneticsK-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills	Skill	56k	4d ago	MIT	A	71	Claude Code, Codex
research-engineerdavila7/claude-code-templates	Skill	33k	yesterday	MIT	A	43	Claude Code, Codex
mapping-to-snomedmaziyarpanahi/openmed	Skill	5.8k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	205	Claude Code