alpha-research

alpha-research is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from companion-inc/feynman. It costs 65 tokens per session (528 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command-line research tool for finding and reading academic papers through AlphaXiv-backed services.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps search for papers, retrieve papers by arXiv ID or URL, question a paper's PDF, read files in its GitHub repository, and save or manage notes.
Why use it?
It gives you one way to search papers, inspect their full text, ask questions about them, and check related code without switching between several research sites.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit It helps search for papers, retrieve papers by arXiv ID or URL, question a paper's PDF, read files in its GitHub repository, and save or manage notes.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/companion-inc/feynman/alpha-research
About the project

Feynman is an open-source AI research agent that helps users investigate topics with language models. It supports local model providers and hosted model authentication through its setup process. The catalogue contains skills, agents, and instructions that extend Feynman’s workflows.

companion-inc/feynman · 8,870 stars · on GitHub · feynman.is

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 companion-inc/feynman --skill alpha-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/companion-inc/feynman

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 alpha-research

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/companion-inc/feynman/alpha-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/companion-inc/feynman/alpha-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 65 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 528 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00065 $0.00528
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00264
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00106
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00053

Measured 10d ago against content hash 66da78ce0470, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alpha-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 10d 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/alpha-research/SKILL.md · 43 lines

What it actually says

Alpha Research CLI

Use visible Feynman alpha tools when they are available. For shell commands, use feynman alpha ...; do not call the user's bare global alpha binary because it can be stale or unpatched.

Commands

Command Description
feynman alpha search "<query>" Search papers. Prefer --mode semantic by default; use --mode keyword only for exact-term lookup and --mode agentic for broader retrieval.
feynman alpha get <arxiv-id-or-url> Fetch paper content and any local annotation
feynman alpha get --full-text <arxiv-id> Get raw full text instead of AI report
feynman alpha ask <arxiv-id> "<question>" Ask a question about a paper's PDF
feynman alpha code <github-url> [path] Read files from a paper's GitHub repo. Use / for overview
feynman alpha annotate <paper-id> "<note>" Save a persistent annotation on a paper
feynman alpha annotate --clear <paper-id> Remove an annotation
feynman alpha annotate --list List all annotations

Auth

Run feynman alpha login to authenticate with alphaXiv. Check status with feynman alpha status.

Examples

feynman alpha search "transformer scaling laws"
feynman alpha search --mode agentic "efficient attention mechanisms for long context"
feynman alpha get 2106.09685
feynman alpha ask 2106.09685 "What optimizer did they use?"
feynman alpha code https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT src/model.py
feynman alpha annotate 2106.09685 "Key paper on LoRA - revisit for adapter comparison"

When to use

  • Academic paper search, reading, Q&A → Feynman alpha tools or feynman alpha
  • Current topics (products, releases, docs) → web search tools
  • Mixed topics → combine both
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. 10d ago First seen · 43 lines · 65 tokens per session scan A 66da78ce0470

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alpha-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository companion-inc/feynman (8,870 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 65 tokens to every session and 528 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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