research

A workflow for researching technical topics and producing an evidence-based document. It covers defining the question, gathering sources, comparing findings, writing the document, and reviewing the result.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to compare technologies or architectures, evaluate tools, answer what experts recommend, and create documents with citations and industry references.
Why use it?
Technical decisions are difficult when information is scattered or based only on opinion. This workflow helps turn research into a sourced recommendation or decision record.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the dev-workflow plugin — 4 skills, 1 command, 5 agents shipped together

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install dev-workflow, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 skills, 1 command, 5 agents.

Per session 28 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 975 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 $0.00028 $0.00975
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00487
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00195
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00097

Measured 2d ago against content hash acee50815931, 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.

dev-workflow/skills/research/SKILL.md · 142 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 142 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research Skill

Overview

Research a technical topic and produce a well-sourced document with direct quotes, industry references, and a clear recommendation.

When to Use

  • Comparing architectural approaches (monorepo vs multi-repo, REST vs gRPC, etc.)
  • Evaluating tools or technologies for adoption
  • Building evidence-based ADRs or decision documents
  • Answering "what do experts recommend for X?" questions
  • Any time the user needs citations and industry backing for a decision

Input

The user provides a topic or question, optionally with:

  • Context about their team/project
  • Specific concerns to address
  • Where to save the output

If not specified, save to docs/ in the current repo.

Workflow

digraph research_flow {
    rankdir=TB;
    node [shape=box];

    input [label="1. Clarify Topic & Scope"];
    research [label="2. Research (Parallel Agents)"];
    synthesize [label="3. Synthesize Findings"];
    write [label="4. Write Document"];
    review [label="5. Show Summary to User"];

    input -> research;
    research -> synthesize;
    synthesize -> write;
    write -> review;
}

Phase 1: Clarify Topic & Scope

Ask the user (if not already clear):

  • What decision or question are they trying to answer?
  • Who is the audience? (teammates, leadership, future self)
  • Any constraints or preferences to bias toward?
  • Where should the doc be saved?

Skip if the user already provided enough context.

Phase 2: Research (Use Parallel Agents)

Launch parallel Task agents to maximize coverage:

  • Agent 1: Official sources — Documentation from the primary tools/frameworks involved (e.g., Terraform docs, Atmos docs, AWS docs)
  • Agent 2: Industry voices — Blog posts, conference talks, and recommendations from recognized companies and engineers
  • Agent 3: Community experience — GitHub discussions, Stack Overflow, Reddit, real-world case studies and post-mortems

Each agent should return:

  • Direct quotes with attribution
  • Source URLs
  • Key data points (scale thresholds, timelines, costs)

Read the full file on GitHub · 142 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 · 142 lines · 28 tokens per session scan A acee50815931

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a skill published in the GitHub repository infraspecdev/tesseract (5 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 28 tokens to every session and 975 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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