tournament-autoresearch

tournament-autoresearch is a skill for Claude Code from gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills. It costs 152 tokens per session (3,035 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An autonomous machine-learning experiment loop that has several research agents propose competing architecture changes before one is tested. A judge critiques and ranks the ideas, then learns from the measured result.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to run repeated ML experiments in which proposals are refined, one change is selected, results are analyzed, and the change is kept or reverted based on its measured effect.
Why use it?
It helps avoid spending computing resources on weak ideas and creates a record of which changes actually improve the chosen metric. It is intended for open-ended experimentation rather than one predetermined test.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents; names the AskUserQuestion tool; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the Agent-Loop-Skills plugin — 25 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to run repeated ML experiments in which proposals are refined, one change is selected, results are analyzed, and the change is kept or reverted based on its measured effect.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/gaasher/agent-loop-skills/tournament-autoresearch
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 gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills --skill tournament-autoresearch
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install Agent-Loop-Skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 25 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 tournament-autoresearch

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gaasher/agent-loop-skills/tournament-autoresearch/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/gaasher/agent-loop-skills/tournament-autoresearch)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gaasher/agent-loop-skills/tournament-autoresearch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gaasher/agent-loop-skills/tournament-autoresearch/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 tournament-autoresearch

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gaasher/agent-loop-skills/tournament-autoresearch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gaasher/agent-loop-skills/tournament-autoresearch.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 152 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,035 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Tool Misuse · line 128
    Tool parameters are crafted to achieve unintended or unsafe behavior. Parameter abuse can bypass intended safety checks (e.g. shell=True, --force, dangerous glob patterns).
    Fix: Validate all tool parameters against an allowlist. Reject dangerous parameter values (shell=True, --force, -rf /) and use safe defaults.
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 $0.00152 $0.03035
Opus 5 $0.00076 $0.01517
Sonnet 5 $0.00030 $0.00607
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00303

Measured 10d ago against content hash 65371be3a55e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

tournament-autoresearch 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.

loops/tournament-autoresearch/SKILL.md · 187 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 187 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Tournament Autoresearch Loop

An ML autoresearch loop whose single "form a hypothesis" step is replaced by an idea tournament. The artifact is an experiment ledger; the feedback signal is the realized <metric> delta of the change that won the tournament. Each iteration <n> ResearchAgents propose competing architecture changes, a Judge critiques and ranks them, the proposers refine, and the Judge selects one change to run. The Judge is the orchestrator and self-calibrates: it scores its predictions against realized results, so it learns which kinds of ideas actually pay off. The experiment mechanics (snapshot → run → mandatory analysis → keep/revert) match the sibling ml-autoresearch loop.

When to use

Use this for open-ended ML experimentation where competing ideas should be vetted before compute is spent and the picker should improve over time. You are the Judge: adopt roles/Judge.md and spawn the proposers with roles/ResearchAgent.md. Default to <n> competing proposers with one refine round; widen <n> or add rounds when ideas are converging too fast. Not for running a single pre-decided experiment, and not for analysis-only exploration over a dataset — for one uncompeted hypothesis per iteration use the sibling ml-autoresearch loop.

The cast and files (all in this folder):

  • roles/Judge.md — your behavior: critique, rank, decide, self-calibrate.
  • roles/ResearchAgent.md — the proposer role, spawned <n> times each round.
  • rubrics/rubric.md — the scoring criteria (shipped defaults; copied to a working copy at setup).
  • schemas/idea.schema.json — what a proposer returns (one proposed change).
  • schemas/verdict.schema.json — what the Judge records per idea (scores, rank, decision).

Setup

Resolve bindings interactively. If loop.run.yaml exists in the working dir, load it, confirm the values in one line, and skip to the loop. Otherwise: on Claude Code (the AskUserQuestion tool is available) infer a likely value for each binding and present it as the recommended option; on other hosts ask each as a quoted plain-text prompt. Then write loop.run.yaml (format: examples/run.example.yaml) and confirm the values before creating any other files.

Read the full file on GitHub · 187 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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. 10d ago First seen · 187 lines · 152 tokens per session scan A 65371be3a55e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

tournament-autoresearch is a skill published in the GitHub repository gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills (169 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 152 tokens to every session and 3,035 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

cerna-analysis

Use when building a ceRNA regulatory network from a key gene list by combining bundled miRNA-mRNA and miRNA-lncRNA database files, with flat-file CSV exports and PDF visualization in a single output directory. NOT for: differential expression, single-cell analysis, enrichment analysis, or workflows without a key gene…

aipoch/medical-research-skills · 68 tokens

cibersort-immune-infiltration-analysis

Use when estimating relative immune cell infiltration from a bulk expression matrix with a CIBERSORT-style nu-SVR deconvolution workflow based on an LM22 signature matrix, comparing one case group against one control group, and generating structured tables plus immune-fraction plots. NOT for single-cell RNA-seq…

aipoch/medical-research-skills · 92 tokens

gene-protein-expression-matrix-normalization

Use when normalizing bulk gene or protein expression matrices with log2 transform, z-score standardization, or min-max scaling before downstream visualization or exploratory analysis. NOT for count-model normalization such as TPM/DESeq2 size factors, batch correction, or single-cell preprocessing.

aipoch/medical-research-skills · 63 tokens

template-autoresearch-project

AutoResearch loop exemplar — deterministic ML candidate evaluation, evidence registries, claim ledgers, artifact manifests, readiness gates.

docxology/template · 30 tokens

autoresearch-ml

Autonomous LLM training optimization with GPU support. Runs 5-minute training experiments, measures valbpb, keeps improvements or reverts — repeat forever. Use this skill when the user asks to "train a model autonomously", "optimize LLM training", "run ML experiments", "autoresearch with GPU", "optimize valbpb"…

proyecto26/autoresearch-ai-plugin · 212 tokens

autoresearch-ml-skill

Autonomous ML training research loop (NVIDIA GPU required) — modify train.py, run fixed-budget experiment, parse valbpb, keep/revert. karpathy-style.

darellchua2/opencode-config-template · 42 tokens