research

A research workflow for studying how browser engines, graphics libraries, layout systems, and canvas editors solve a technical problem before implementation. It records findings in the repository's research documents and checks existing internal knowledge first.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when investigating rendering, layout, compositing, CSS behavior, graphics-library APIs, or architectures used by projects such as Chromium, Skia, Servo, Excalidraw, or tldraw.
Why use it?
It reduces duplicated investigation and grounds design decisions in code and documented prior work from relevant projects.

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/gridaco/nothing/research
Any agent
npx skills add gridaco/nothing --skill research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gridaco/nothing

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 58 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,403 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 $0.00058 $0.02403
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.01202
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00481
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00240

Measured 2d ago against content hash bb3fb8b592e8, 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 2d 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.

.agents/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.

Code Research Skill

Workflow for going from "how does X work?" to a documented survey grounded in prior art from upstream and peer projects.

When to Use This Skill

  • Investigating how a browser engine solves a rendering/layout/compositing problem
  • Looking up undocumented Skia API behavior
  • Understanding CSS feature semantics before adding support
  • Comparing canvas editor architectures (excalidraw, tldraw)
  • Writing or extending docs/wg/research/ documents

How to Orient Yourself

Before touching any external repo, check what Grida already knows.

What you need How to find it
Existing research on a topic docs/wg/research/chromium/index.md (topic map)
Code that cites sources grep "based on|adapted from|ported from" --include="*.rs"
Vendored third-party code ls third_party/
Feature docs for a subsystem ls docs/wg/feat-*/

If already documented, cite it and move on.


Reference Repositories

Local clones (optional): If ~/Documents/GitHub/ exists, it may contain default-style clones (sibling dirs named by repo, e.g. skia). Prefer searching there before cloning or using only the web.

Repo Lang When to reference Key paths
chromium C++ Skia usage, compositing, layer trees, paint scheduling, tiling, GPU resources cc/ third_party/blink/renderer/ components/viz/
skia C++ Undocumented API behavior, GPU internals, filter details src/gpu/ src/core/ src/effects/
rust-skia Rust Rust binding ergonomics — our direct skia-safe dependency skia-safe/src/
resvg Rust SVG rendering, path conversion, filter effects crates/resvg/src/ crates/usvg/src/
servo Rust CSS layout, DOM, Rust browser-engine patterns. We vendor its style system components/style/ components/layout/
stylo Rust CSS parsing and style resolution style/
taffy Rust Flexbox/Grid layout algorithms src/tree/ src/compute/ src/style/
excalidraw TS Canvas API optimization, rendering heuristics, interaction packages/excalidraw/renderer/
tldraw TS CRDT state model, modular SDK, DOM/SVG canvas packages/editor/ packages/store/

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. 2d ago First seen · 158 lines · 58 tokens per session scan A bb3fb8b592e8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a skill published in the GitHub repository gridaco/nothing (43 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 2,403 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 2026-08-30.

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