researching-codebases

researching-codebases is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bostonaholic/team. It costs 40 tokens per session (761 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research procedure for answering neutral questions about one or more codebases using evidence from the files. Findings include file and line references and follow a compact report format.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate behavior, execution paths, shared interfaces, and differences between repositories.
Why use it?
It keeps codebase answers factual and traceable instead of relying on guesses or names that only suggest how code works.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the team plugin — 42 skills, 13 agents, 2 hooks shipped together

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/bostonaholic/team/researching-codebases
Any agent
npx skills add bostonaholic/team --skill researching-codebases
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bostonaholic/team

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install team, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 42 skills, 13 agents, 2 hooks.

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 researching-codebases

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/researching-codebases.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/researching-codebases)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/researching-codebases"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/researching-codebases.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 761 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 $0.00040 $0.00761
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00380
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00152
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00076

Measured today against content hash 19bd92c3ed44, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

researching-codebases 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 today.

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/researching-codebases/SKILL.md · 92 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 92 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Researching Codebases

The researcher's procedure: answer a list of neutral research questions with compressed, objective, file-referenced findings.

Investigation contract

Answer every question in questions.md, scoped by its "Codebase context" section — and by repos.md when present (each repo's slug and absolute path; which repo each question targets). How you investigate is yours to choose. The output format below defines what complete findings look like; two constraints hold on the way there:

  • Evidence over recall. Every claim traces to code you read in this run — cite file:line. When a question concerns behavior, follow the execution path far enough to see the code that runs, not just a name that suggests it. A claim earns its place only with cited evidence (skills/principle-evidence-over-assertion/SKILL.md).
  • Cross-repo contracts are findings. In multi-repo mode, contracts that cross repo boundaries (shared types, API schemas) go in ## Constraints, and conventions that differ between repos go in ## Patterns Observed.

Output format

Report findings in this structure. Keep the entire report under 100 lines (under 150 in multi-repo mode — extra budget for the per-repo sections). The orchestrator writes the findings to docs/plans/<id>/research.md.

In multi-repo mode, prefix every file reference with the repo slug, e.g. frontend:src/App.tsx:42. The slug is the name field from the matching entry in repos.md.

## Tech Stack
- Language, framework, key libraries with versions if visible
  (multi-repo: list per repo, e.g. "frontend: React 18; api: Go 1.22")

## Directory Conventions
- How the codebase is organized, where things go
  (multi-repo: one bullet per repo)

## Answers to Questions
### Q1: <restate question>
<answer with file:line references>

### Q2: <restate question>
<answer with file:line references>
...

## Patterns Observed
- How the codebase implements similar concerns
- Error handling conventions
- Naming conventions

## Test Patterns
- Test framework and assertion style
- Test file location convention
- Fixture/helper patterns

## Reusable Components
- Existing utilities, helpers, or abstractions
- Shared types or interfaces

## Constraints
- Hard constraints (type contracts, schema requirements, API compatibility)
- Soft constraints (conventions worth following for consistency)

## Open Questions
- Anything ambiguous that the design-author should resolve with the user

Read the full file on GitHub · 92 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. today Changed · +3 lines 19bd92c3ed44
  2. 4d ago First seen · 89 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A 5527dd7832a1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

researching-codebases is a skill published in the GitHub repository bostonaholic/team (11 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 761 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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