refresh-research

A procedure for re-fetching research sources that can change, such as repositories and documentation, then updating the related research summaries. It keeps newly fetched source files alongside older versions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to refresh selected files, categories, or all refreshable research; find sources older than a chosen number of days; backfill missing source types; or run an audit.
Why use it?
It helps keep research current without overwriting the original captured sources or replacing the structure of existing summaries. It can also report stale sources without making changes.

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/harnessprotocol/harness-kit/refresh-research
Any agent
npx skills add harnessprotocol/harness-kit --skill refresh-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/harnessprotocol/harness-kit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,752 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 $0.00052 $0.03752
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.01876
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00750
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00375

Measured 2d ago against content hash 14816c04a074, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

refresh-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.

plugins/research/skills/refresh-research/SKILL.md · 403 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 403 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research Refresh Protocol

Overview

Re-fetch live research sources (repos, docs), detect meaningful changes since initial capture, and update synthesis files. Raw sources are versioned (never overwritten), syntheses are surgically updated, and INDEX.md is rebuilt.

Core principles:

  1. Only refreshable sources are fetched. repo and docs source types. Blogs, papers, videos, and internal docs are static — skip them.
  2. Raw sources are versioned, never overwritten. New fetch → new file with today's date.
  3. Syntheses are updated, not replaced. Preserve analysis and structure; update facts.

When to Use

User types /refresh-research followed by:

Invocation Behavior
(empty) Interactive — show stale entries, let user pick which to refresh
research/agent-memory/cognee-architecture.md Refresh a specific synthesis file
agent-memory All refreshable entries in that category
--all All refreshable entries across all categories
--stale 14 Entries not checked in 14+ days (default threshold: 30)
--backfill One-time: add source_type to entries missing it
--audit Dry-run: staleness report, no modifications

Flags can be combined: /refresh-research agent-memory --stale 7

Frontmatter Fields

Three optional fields extend the existing synthesis frontmatter:

---
tags: [github, memory, open-source]
date: 2026-02-12              # original research date (unchanged meaning)
source: https://docs.cognee.ai/
source_type: docs              # NEW — repo | docs | blog | paper | internal | video
last_checked: 2026-03-16      # NEW — when last verified against source
refresh_status: changed        # NEW — changed | unchanged | dead-link | archived
---
  • source_type gates refresh eligibility — only repo and docs are refreshable
  • last_checked is the staleness clock (separate from date which means "first captured")
  • refresh_status is informational only (doesn't gate behavior)

Read the full file on GitHub · 403 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. 2d ago First seen · 403 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A 14816c04a074

Subscribe to this mod's changes

refresh-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository harnessprotocol/harness-kit (10 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 3,752 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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