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.
npx skills add icerain-cmd/humanities-superpowers --skill formulating-research-questiongit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/icerain-cmd/humanities-superpowersWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/icerain-cmd/humanities-superpowers/formulating-research-question)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/icerain-cmd/humanities-superpowers/formulating-research-question"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/icerain-cmd/humanities-superpowers/formulating-research-question.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00038 | $0.02366 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00019 | $0.01183 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00008 | $0.00473 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00237 |
Grade A, and why
formulating-research-question 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 281 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Formulating a Research Question
Purpose
Transform a broad topic or dissatisfaction into a contestable research question with an explicit object, unresolved tension, stakes, and feasible evidentiary path. This skill supports scholarly judgment; it does not manufacture novelty or decide what the researcher ought to value.
Contract
Accepts
- A topic, corpus, archive, concept, event, medium, practice, or preliminary observation.
- Notes describing what seems puzzling, inadequate, contradictory, or underexplained.
- Optional disciplinary, temporal, linguistic, geographic, or institutional constraints.
Requires
- At least one identifiable research object or candidate corpus.
- At least one unresolved tension stated without assuming its answer.
- Enough information to distinguish the topic from the research problem.
Produces
- One
ResearchQuestionrecord for the selected primary question. - Up to two subordinate questions.
- A short research-problem statement.
- A list of evidence classes required to answer the question.
- A provisional hypothesis explicitly marked
hypothesis.
May produce
- Two or three alternative question formulations with trade-offs.
- A
FAILorCONDITIONAL PASSgate report when the object, tension, or evidence path remains unclear.
Fails when
- The requested question presupposes the conclusion.
- The object or corpus cannot be identified.
- The question requires inaccessible evidence and no narrower formulation is possible.
- The request asks the agent to declare novelty without a literature check.
Guarantees
- The selected question will explicitly name its object, unresolved relation, and expected evidence path.
- Unresolved elements will remain visible rather than being silently invented.
- The output will distinguish question, hypothesis, and conclusion.
Does not guarantee
- Originality, disciplinary significance, publication value, or a successful final answer.
- That the listed evidence actually exists or will support the hypothesis.
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.
- 7d ago First seen · 281 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A 896dd18c72b8
formulating-research-question is a skill published in the GitHub repository icerain-cmd/humanities-superpowers (16 stars, last pushed 17d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 2,366 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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