research-loop

A research workflow for studying why evolutionary code changes improve results. It builds a derivation forest, meaning a linked record of changes, explanations, evidence, and open questions, from completed experiments.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after an evolution run to inspect its status and lineage, organize important changes, test explanations, connect them to research, and assess contributions.
Why use it?
It turns a record of what changed and what improved into a reasoned explanation that can support a research paper.

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/research-loop
Any agent
npx skills add DataLab-atom/EvoAny --skill research-loop
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/DataLab-atom/EvoAny

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,498 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 $0.00038 $0.01498
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00749
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00300
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00150

Measured 3d ago against content hash bf2c05da1361, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research-loop 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 3d 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/research-loop/SKILL.md · 157 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 157 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/research-loop — Research Derivation Loop

C4: Core research verification loop — drives the derivation forest from evolution results to deep motivation discovery.

Purpose

Starting from completed evolution results (code changes + performance data), iteratively build a derivation forest to discover why the changes work, find deep motivations, and grade contributions for paper writing.

Usage

/research-loop [evo_session_id]

If no session ID given, uses the current/most recent evolution session.

Behavior

Phase 1: Initialization

  1. Call evo_get_status to get evolution results summary
  2. Call evo_get_lineage for the best branch to understand the full change history
  3. Call research_init_forest to create a new derivation forest
  4. For each significant code change in the lineage:
    • Call research_add_node(type="change") to register it as a root node

Phase 2: Iterative Exploration (main loop)

Each iteration performs 5 steps:

Step 1 — Cut into code changes

  • Read the current active change nodes
  • Use code_qa to understand what each change does
  • May merge or split change nodes via research_merge_nodes
  • Add refined change nodes as needed

Step 2 — Reverse reasoning: why does it work?

  • For each active change node, hypothesize why it improves performance
  • Call research_add_node(type="hypothesis", parent_ids=[change_id])
  • Consider: what unsolved domain problem does this address?

Step 3 — Literature search

  • For each new hypothesis, call /ask-lit with the hypothesis as query
  • Call research_add_node(type="evidence", literature_refs=[...]) for each finding
  • Update hypothesis nodes with literature context

Step 4 — Experimental verification & visualization

  • Design targeted experiments (ablation / control) to test hypotheses
  • Call bench_adapt + bench_run to execute experiments
  • Call bench_validate to check result reasonableness
  • Call viz_generate to generate ablation curves, score distributions, and contribution heatmaps for each confirmed hypothesis. Save outputs to research/figures/.
  • Call viz_polish to polish the figures for publication quality.
  • Record figure paths in evidence nodes so write-experiment can reference them later.
  • Supported: research_update_node(status="pruned") for rejected hypotheses
  • Supported: continue deepening for confirmed hypotheses

Read the full file on GitHub · 157 lines

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. 3d ago First seen · 157 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A bf2c05da1361

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research-loop is a skill published in the GitHub repository DataLab-atom/EvoAny (37 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 1,498 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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