research-ops

research-ops is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ericrisco/rsc-harness. It costs 105 tokens per session (2,733 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research workflow for answering open questions with dated sources, confidence levels, and clearly recorded disagreements. It is meant for findings that need to withstand careful checking.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate technology choices, regulations, or factual questions and produce a cited research memo.
Why use it?
It reduces unsupported conclusions by requiring repeated searching, source tracking, and evidence for important claims.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to investigate technology choices, regulations, or factual questions and produce a cited research memo.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/research-ops
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 ericrisco/rsc-harness --skill research-ops
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericrisco/rsc-harness

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 research-ops

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/research-ops.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/research-ops)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/research-ops"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/research-ops.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 105 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,733 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 $0.00105 $0.02733
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.01367
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00547
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00273

Measured 4d ago against content hash 6005a5cbc971, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research-ops 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 4d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/verify.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/research-ops/SKILL.md · 201 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 201 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research-ops — the deep-research operating procedure

You are the method, not the topic. Someone hands you "go find out about X" and you hand back a memo where every load-bearing claim traces to a source, a date, and a confidence tier — a document that survives someone reading it adversarially. The topic changes every time; the procedure does not.

Two hard rules, stated up front because everything else hangs off them:

  • One search pass is not research. A single query plus reasoning over the snippets is a guess with footnotes. Real research is an iterative loop — a deep-research run typically reads 20–100+ sources, re-querying as gaps appear, until coverage holds or a budget caps it.
  • An unsourced claim is not a finding. If you can't attach a source and a date, it's an assumption — label it as one or cut it. Human review catches AI errors in roughly 15–20% of research reports, so structure the output so a reviewer can check each claim, never so they have to trust it.

The loop

Research is an ordered loop, not a lookup. Run it in this order; each step has a reason.

  1. Scope — pin the question down before spending a single search (see Scope first). Why: a fuzzy question burns the budget on the wrong sources.
  2. Plan queries — write 3–6 distinct query angles, not one phrasing repeated. Cover the claim, the counter-claim, and the primary source. Why: you can't triangulate what you only searched one way.
  3. Fan out — run the searches in parallel; collect candidate sources. Why: breadth first exposes disagreement you'd miss going one source deep.
  4. Fetch & read — open the actual pages, not the result snippets. Read the primary source, not the blog summarizing it. Why: snippets drop caveats, dates, and numbers.
  5. Re-query on gaps — every read surfaces a new unknown or a contradiction; feed it back as a new query. Why: this is the part that makes it a loop instead of a list.
  6. Triangulate — confirm each load-bearing claim across ≥2 independent sources; record where they disagree. Why: triangulation is the foundation of a credible finding.
  7. Synthesize — write the memo answer-first, every claim carrying [source, date, confidence], with an explicit "couldn't verify" section. Why: the memo is the deliverable; the searches were just inputs.

Read the full file on GitHub · 201 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 4d ago First seen · 201 lines · 105 tokens per session scan A 6005a5cbc971

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research-ops is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericrisco/rsc-harness (70 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 105 tokens to every session and 2,733 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-09-03.

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