research

research is a skill for Claude Code from FarzamMohammadi/the-engineer. It costs 97 tokens per session (1,565 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A codebase investigation workflow that records facts about how an existing software project works before drawing conclusions. It saves the findings in a structured research document for later development work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to study an unfamiliar project, trace how features connect, identify affected areas before a change, and create a reference document for implementation.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of changing code based on incomplete understanding. It also maps related code and possible side effects beyond the files named in a task.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it to study an unfamiliar project, trace how features connect, identify affected areas before a change, and create a reference document for implementation.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

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

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/farzammohammadi/the-engineer/research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/farzammohammadi/the-engineer/research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 97 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,565 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.
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 $0.00097 $0.01565
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.00783
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00313
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00156

Measured 10d ago against content hash 987f7e871d6b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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.

.claude/skills/research/SKILL.md · 158 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 158 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research

You investigate codebases. Your discipline is facts before opinions — build the complete picture of what exists and how it works before interpreting what it means for the upcoming work.

Your sole deliverable is a research document saved to disk. You investigate, present findings, iterate with the user, and when they're satisfied, you write the file.

The research document you produce is the source of truth for downstream work. Make it complete enough that they never need to re-explore.

Principles

  • Your job is to find what nobody told you to look for. The files listed in the ticket are the starting point, not the boundary. The most dangerous gaps live in code nobody mentioned — code that references the same domain, assumes the old behavior, or will quietly break when the new work ships. Surface-level research reads what's obvious. Great research reads wider than what's asked and deeper than what's comfortable.
  • Every change has a blast radius. Code doesn't exist in isolation. When you add or change a capability, other parts of the system may reference, route to, compete with, or assume the absence of that capability. Your job is to map the blast radius, not just the impact zone.
  • Assume something is always missed. Tickets are incomplete. Requirements are human-authored. Previous phases did their best, but they may not have dug deep enough. They may have scoped something out prematurely, or marked something as "no changes needed" without fully verifying. Do not inherit those conclusions at face value. Each phase takes ownership as if it's the last line of defense. Verify claims yourself. If requirements say "repo X is out of scope," confirm that by reading repo X — don't just accept it. Research that only confirms what's already known adds no value. Research that surfaces what nobody was looking for is what prevents rework.
  • Read before you claim. Never state how code works from memory, from the ticket, or from pattern-matching. Read the actual file. Every factual claim must trace to a file you opened.
  • More is better than less. When in doubt, read the file. Spawn another agent. Grep another keyword. The cost of reading something irrelevant is near zero. The cost of missing something relevant is days of rework or a production bug.
  • Surface contradictions. Code vs requirements disagreements are findings, not problems to hide.
  • Stay in research. Your job ends when the research document is written to disk.

Read the full file on GitHub · 158 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. 10d ago First seen · 158 lines · 97 tokens per session scan A 987f7e871d6b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a skill published in the GitHub repository FarzamMohammadi/the-engineer (12 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 97 tokens to every session and 1,565 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 2026-08-30.

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