PrettySeriousResearcher: Skill for Claude Code

.claude/skills/research-algo-design/SKILL.md

research-algo-design is a skill for Claude Code from fbabelle/PrettySeriousResearcher. It costs 59 tokens per session (2,626 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A research and implementation workflow for choosing and building algorithms for an AI or finance problem. It compares candidate methods before implementing one and testing it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to evaluate two to four algorithms, select an approach, implement it with tests, create comparison variants for later experiments, and check that the problem is solvable.
Why use it?
It helps decide whether a proposed problem can be solved within practical limits and exposes trade-offs in speed, memory, reliability, assumptions, and maturity.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/.

This is fbabelle/PrettySeriousResearcher's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on PrettySeriousResearcher itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything PrettySeriousResearcher configures →

Part of the research-paper-skills plugin — 17 skills shipped together

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to fbabelle/PrettySeriousResearcher. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fbabelle/PrettySeriousResearcher/main/.claude/skills/research-algo-design/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fbabelle/PrettySeriousResearcher

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install research-paper-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 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 research-algo-design

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fbabelle/prettyseriousresearcher/research-algo-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fbabelle/prettyseriousresearcher/research-algo-design.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,626 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 $0.00059 $0.02626
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.01313
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00525
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00263

Measured 7d ago against content hash 63953eb0b1c7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research-algo-design 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 7d 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-algo-design/SKILL.md · 77 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 77 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Phase 2 — Algorithm / solution design & implementation

Turn the Phase-1 gap into a concrete, implemented method. The deliverable is a chosen approach implemented with tests, a set of candidate variants for later ablations, and a passed solvability gate.

Step 1 — Per-candidate technical evaluation (depth)

Phase 1 asked "is the topic worth it?" (breadth). Phase 2 asks "can these specific approaches solve the framed problem, and which is best?" For each candidate approach (aim for 2–4), evaluate:

  • Effectiveness — does the mechanism plausibly close the gap? On what evidence (prior results, theory, a quick spike)?
  • Efficiency — compute/memory/latency cost; does it fit the local-execution envelope (see research-experiments)?
  • Limitations & assumptions — where it breaks; what it silently assumes about the data/market. Extract the assumption fine print from primary sources (exact dependence/independence conditions, calibration requirements, what the theorems actually cover) — method-level assumptions routinely decide the whole stack choice, and secondary summaries omit them.
  • Maturity — is it rare/underexplored (novelty upside, more risk) or over-exploited (well-understood, lower novelty)?
  • The named-SOTA limitation it removes — each candidate must name the specific limitation of a named SOTA method it beats (carried from the Phase-1 candidate card), plus a co-primary efficiency/robustness metric (compute, latency, turnover, drawdown) alongside the headline number — not "it's novel" in the abstract.

Use the host agent's current web-search and page-fetch tools for prior-art lookups on specific methods. This evaluation also defines the baselines the experiments will measure against — capture them now.

Step 2 — The solvability gate (hard checkpoint)

Before building, answer plainly: can at least one candidate plausibly solve the framed problem within our data/compute/budget envelope?

Present the verdict as an advisor-style ranked modification report the user confirms, not a pass/fail the agent self-clears: per candidate, its strengths/weaknesses, prioritized next steps to make it work, and an explicit feasible / unfeasible classification — so the user chooses which approach to build from a pre-critiqued slate (the same confirm surface the orchestrator gates rely on), rather than auditing raw analysis.

Read the full file on GitHub · 77 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. 7d ago Changed · +10 lines 63953eb0b1c7
  2. 12d ago First seen · 67 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A 9c7aaa3d7a25

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research-algo-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository fbabelle/PrettySeriousResearcher (2 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 2,626 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.

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