ask-lit

ask-lit is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from DataLab-atom/EvoAny. It costs 41 tokens per session (473 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A research assistant that answers questions by searching a local collection of academic papers and, when needed, finding more papers online. It can add newly found papers to the local collection and cite the sources.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find relevant academic work, understand research findings, compare methods, and investigate whether an idea is novel.
Why use it?
It reduces the time spent searching papers across separate tools and helps you check what research already exists on an idea.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/datalab-atom/evoany/ask-lit
Any agent
npx skills add DataLab-atom/EvoAny --skill ask-lit
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/DataLab-atom/EvoAny

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 ask-lit

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/datalab-atom/evoany/ask-lit.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/datalab-atom/evoany/ask-lit)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/datalab-atom/evoany/ask-lit"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/datalab-atom/evoany/ask-lit.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 473 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 $0.00041 $0.00473
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00236
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00095
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00047

Measured 5d ago against content hash 281266a1da96, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ask-lit 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 5d 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.

plugin/skills/ask-lit/SKILL.md · 68 lines

What it actually says

/ask-lit — Literature Question Answering

A4: Unified literature interface — local-first, online-supplement, auto-ingest.

Purpose

Answer a research question using academic literature. Prioritizes the local vector database, supplements with online search when needed, and automatically ingests new papers for future queries.

Usage

/ask-lit <question or topic>

Examples:

  • /ask-lit attention mechanism for long-tailed recognition
  • /ask-lit why does mixup regularization improve calibration
  • /ask-lit SOTA methods for CIFAR-100-LT

Behavior

  1. Local search first — call lit_search_local with the query

    • If >= 3 relevant results (score > 0.1): proceed to answer
  2. Online supplement (if local results < 3)

    • Invoke /search-lit to find papers online
    • New papers are automatically ingested into the local DB via lit_ingest
    • Merge online results with local results
  3. Synthesize answer

    • Read the abstracts / content of the top results
    • Generate a concise answer to the question
    • Cite papers using BibTeX keys: [authorYYYYword]
  4. Return

    • The synthesized answer
    • A list of cited papers with full BibTeX entries
    • Call bib_append to add new citations to research/refs/references.bib

Output Format

## Answer

<synthesized answer with [citations]>

## References

<BibTeX entries>

Tool Usage

Tool Purpose
lit_search_local Search local vector DB
/search-lit Online literature search (when local is insufficient)
lit_ingest Auto-ingest new papers
bib_append Persist citations to references.bib
code_qa If question involves code from the evolution
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. 5d ago First seen · 68 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 281266a1da96

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ask-lit is a skill published in the GitHub repository DataLab-atom/EvoAny (37 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 473 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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