web-research

web-research is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from existential-birds/beagle. It costs 165 tokens per session (3,210 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A workflow for researching a specific question on the web using multiple sources and recording the evidence behind each finding.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan research, gather evidence on separate subtopics, and produce a cited summary report.
Why use it?
It makes research easier to audit by linking claims to source titles, URLs, and quoted supporting passages, while marking unanswered questions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the beagle-analysis plugin — 14 skills 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/existential-birds/beagle/web-research
Any agent
npx skills add existential-birds/beagle --skill web-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/existential-birds/beagle

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install beagle-analysis, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 14 skills.

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 web-research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/existential-birds/beagle/web-research.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/existential-birds/beagle/web-research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/existential-birds/beagle/web-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/existential-birds/beagle/web-research.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 165 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,210 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 $0.00165 $0.03210
Opus 5 $0.00082 $0.01605
Sonnet 5 $0.00033 $0.00642
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00321

Measured 4d ago against content hash f82158f852d1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

web-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 4d 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.

plugins/beagle-analysis/skills/web-research/SKILL.md · 204 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 204 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Web Research

Turn a sharp research question into cited, gap-flagged findings by delegating to parallel web-search subagents.

The deliverable is always on disk: a written plan the caller can review, one findings file per subtopic, and a synthesized report with numbered citations. Nothing returns as inline prose, and no claim ships without a URL + title + verbatim excerpt behind it.

When to use

  • A user asks for web research on a topic — "research X", "look up sources for Y", "gather evidence on Z".
  • Another beagle skill invokes this one programmatically as a research companion (see references/companion-contract.md).
  • The caller wants auditable output: a plan the user approved, findings files per subtopic, and a citation-backed synthesis.

When NOT to use

  • Codebase lookups ("where is this function defined", "search the repo"). Search the codebase instead.
  • Local file search or document extraction. Use local file search or artifact-analysis.
  • Comparative evaluation of two implementations. Use llm-judge.
  • Paywalled or authentication-gated scraping. Out of scope — ask the caller to paste extracted content instead.
  • Reshaping or coaching the research question. That is the caller's job; this skill treats the incoming question as final.

Workflow

Four steps, in order. No step is skippable.

  1. Write plan.md — main question verbatim, 1-5 non-overlapping subtopics, what each subtopic should establish, and how the findings will be synthesized.
  2. Plan review gate — show the plan to the user for confirmation. Skipped only when the caller passes auto_proceed: true.
  3. Dispatch subagents and synthesize — spawn up to 3 concurrent subagents (one per subtopic), wait for all to return, then write report.md.
  4. Verify before returning — run the verification checklist in references/failure-modes.md to confirm all expected artifacts exist and are well-formed. Any check that fails becomes an entry in Gaps & Limitations.

Read the full file on GitHub · 204 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 · 204 lines · 165 tokens per session scan A f82158f852d1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

web-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository existential-birds/beagle (79 stars, last pushed 25d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 165 tokens to every session and 3,210 once invoked, about $0.0008 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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