grounded-research

grounded-research is a skill for Claude Code from asteasolutions/ai-toolkit. It costs 117 tokens per session (1,724 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research workflow for answering questions with traceable evidence. It covers web research, codebase research, product and policy questions, and opinion or review research.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you need source-backed conclusions, exact citations, text links, or evidence from both websites and local files.
Why use it?
It helps separate verified facts from assumptions and exposes weak evidence or counterexamples.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/. Also seen: mentions subagents.

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/asteasolutions/ai-toolkit/grounded-research
Any agent
npx skills add asteasolutions/ai-toolkit --skill grounded-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/asteasolutions/ai-toolkit

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 grounded-research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/asteasolutions/ai-toolkit/grounded-research.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/asteasolutions/ai-toolkit/grounded-research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/asteasolutions/ai-toolkit/grounded-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/asteasolutions/ai-toolkit/grounded-research.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 117 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,724 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 5.1 $0.00117 $0.01724
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.00862
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00345
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00172

Measured 6d ago against content hash 9cea01bdbc85, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

grounded-research 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 6d 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.

.claude/skills/grounded-research/SKILL.md · 164 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 164 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Grounded research

Leading word: audit

Run research as an audit: every conclusion must trace to exact evidence, survive a counter-case, and expose its weak spots. The goal is not maximal length; the goal is a source-backed answer the user can inspect.

Load a reference only when it applies:

  • references/web.md — evidence is on the web.
  • references/codebase.md — evidence is in a repo or local files.

For hybrid tasks load both branch files and keep web receipts separate from local receipts.

Step 1: Classify the branch and depth

Choose both a branch and a depth before researching. State the assumption only when it affects interpretation.

Branches

  • Evidence branch: what is true, likely true, safest, best supported, most reliable, or most accurate.
  • Opinion branch: what people think, user sentiment, complaints, reviews, Reddit/X/forum reactions, or community experience.
  • Product/tool branch: whether to adopt, compare, trust, buy, configure, or rely on a tool, model, library, service, API, device, or workflow.
  • Policy/legal/medical/financial branch: current rules or high-stakes guidance. Use current primary sources and disclose jurisdiction or scope limits.

Depths

  • Light audit: simple fact-check, single narrow claim, or low-stakes answer. Use at least one strong source; include countercheck only if obvious.
  • Standard audit: default for research. Use primary sources when available, one or more independent corroborating sources, an adversarial check, and concise confidence labels.

Completion criterion: branch and depth are chosen, and the evidence plan matches the user’s stakes instead of forcing every answer into the heaviest format.

Step 2: Researcher pass

Build the strongest source-backed answer. A material claim is one that affects the answer's conclusion, confidence, recommendation, or interpretation.

  • Among sources in the same tier, prefer ones that support exact passage links, especially text fragment links. Never pick a weaker source because it has a fragment link.
  • Use current sources when facts may have changed.
  • Capture only evidence that directly supports or weakens a material claim.
  • Separate findings from interpretation and recommendation.
  • Track non-fragment links, unavailable primary sources, old sources, missing jurisdictions, missing versions, and uncertainty.

Read the full file on GitHub · 164 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 164 lines · 117 tokens per session scan A 9cea01bdbc85

Subscribe to this mod's changes

grounded-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository asteasolutions/ai-toolkit (5 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 117 tokens to every session and 1,724 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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