research

A research workflow that compares several ways to solve a development task using current library documentation and project files. It records the options and their tradeoffs for a human to review.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to prepare solution options before writing a specification, especially when library choices, performance, compliance, or other requirements matter.
Why use it?
It reduces guesswork when choosing a technical approach and avoids relying on outdated knowledge about libraries. It also brings project constraints and existing code patterns into the comparison.

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/friedbotstudio/baseline/research
Any agent
npx skills add friedbotstudio/baseline --skill research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/friedbotstudio/baseline

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 96 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,542 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 $0.00096 $0.01542
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.00771
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00308
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00154

Measured yesterday against content hash 0e7fbd966823, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 yesterday.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (retrieve.mjs), 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.

.claude/skills/research/SKILL.md · 97 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 97 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are surfacing a small set of candidate approaches to a task, with honest tradeoffs, so the spec author can pick one. Decisions are not made here — the human reviewer decides at /spec. Your job is to lay out the option space.

Prereqs

  • scout in completed OR in exceptions.

Inputs

  • The intake at docs/intake/<slug>.mdConstraints and Acceptance criteria sections filter which approaches are viable.
  • The scout report at docs/scout/<slug>.md — patterns in use, touchpoints, landmines.
  • The BRD at docs/brd/<slug>.md if present — NFR-### requirements (latency, compliance, etc.).
  • The existing tech stack — read package.json, pyproject.toml, go.mod, lockfiles.

Mandatory: verify library APIs against current docs (the provider is a default)

For any library you intend to cite, verify its API against current documentation — never training recall.

The MCP server that fetches those docs is named in .claude/docs-provider.json; resolve it with readDocsProvider from .claude/skills/lib/docs-provider.mjs, which falls back to the shipped default when the pointer is absent or unreadable. Use that server's own library-resolution and documentation-fetch tools — read their names from the tool list rather than assuming a shape, because a project may point at a different provider.

Never cite an API from memory. Record the version present in the lockfile and confirm the docs match that major version. If the provider has no coverage (or the project ships none), fall back to WebFetch against the library's official docs / llms.txt and note the source. Any current-docs source satisfies the rule — the declared provider is the convenient default, not a hard requirement (seed.md §2.5).

Method

  1. Retrieve prior art before deriving. Run:

    node .claude/skills/research/retrieve.mjs --slug <slug> --terms "<intake topics + scout touched modules>" \
      --touched '["<scout-touched path>","<scout-touched path>"]' --spec-dir docs/system 2>/dev/null
    

Read the full file on GitHub · 97 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. yesterday First seen · 97 lines · 96 tokens per session scan A 0e7fbd966823

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a skill published in the GitHub repository friedbotstudio/baseline (11 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 96 tokens to every session and 1,542 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.