investigate

investigate is a skill for Claude Code from john-wilmes/claude-agentic-coding-playbook. It costs 82 tokens per session (6,518 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured workflow for investigations such as root-cause analysis, where evidence is collected, organised, reviewed, and sanitised. PHI means protected health information, such as identifiable medical data.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create, run, collect, search, synthesise, close, and check the status of investigations.
Why use it?
It gives a repeatable way to manage an investigation from opening it through evidence collection, synthesis, and closure.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Good fit Use it to create, run, collect, search, synthesise, close, and check the status of investigations.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/john-wilmes/claude-agentic-coding-playbook/investigate
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 john-wilmes/claude-agentic-coding-playbook --skill investigate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/john-wilmes/claude-agentic-coding-playbook

Made for: Claude Code.

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 investigate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/john-wilmes/claude-agentic-coding-playbook/investigate/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/john-wilmes/claude-agentic-coding-playbook/investigate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/john-wilmes/claude-agentic-coding-playbook/investigate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/john-wilmes/claude-agentic-coding-playbook/investigate/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 investigate

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/john-wilmes/claude-agentic-coding-playbook/investigate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/john-wilmes/claude-agentic-coding-playbook/investigate.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 82 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 6,518 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.
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 $0.00082 $0.06518
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.03259
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.01304
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00652

Measured 9d ago against content hash af3cda3a03db, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

investigate 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 9d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/check-citations.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

profiles/combined/skills/investigate/SKILL.md · 712 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 712 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Investigate (v2)

Manage structured investigations.

Install Root Discovery

Before any subcommand, determine where the playbook's .claude/ directory is installed. The install root may differ from ~/.claude/ if the user ran install.sh --root <path>.

Run the install-root discovery helper:

INSTALL_ROOT=$(bash ~/.claude/scripts/skills/find-install-root.sh)

Set INVESTIGATIONS_DIR to <INSTALL_ROOT>/.claude/investigations. Set TEMPLATES_DIR to <INSTALL_ROOT>/.claude/templates/investigation.


Argument Parsing

Parse $ARGUMENTS into:

  • id: The investigation identifier (e.g., AUTH-001, SLOW-QUERY). Required for all subcommands except list and search.
  • subcommand: One of new, run, collect, synthesize, close, status. If omitted, auto-detect from STATUS.md.

Special forms:

  • /investigate list -- no id needed
  • /investigate search <query> -- query is everything after "search"
  • /investigate <id> -- auto-detect phase
  • /investigate <id> <subcommand> -- explicit phase

Subcommand: list

List all investigations with their status and tags.

Steps

  1. Glob for $INVESTIGATIONS_DIR/*/STATUS.md (exclude _patterns/).
  2. For each investigation, read STATUS.md to get current phase and FINDINGS.md frontmatter for tags.
  3. Present as a table:
| ID | Phase | Domain | Type | Updated |
|----|-------|--------|------|---------|

If no investigations exist, say so and suggest /investigate <id> new.


Search investigations by text content or tag values.

Steps

  1. Parse the query from $ARGUMENTS (everything after "search").
  2. Check if query matches a tag pattern (e.g., domain:ehr, type:root-cause). If so, search FINDINGS.md YAML frontmatter for matching values.
  3. Otherwise, grep across all investigation files for the query text.
  4. Present matching investigations with context snippets.

Subcommand: new

Create a new investigation scaffold.

Read the full file on GitHub · 712 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 9d ago First seen · 712 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A af3cda3a03db

Subscribe to this mod's changes

investigate is a skill published in the GitHub repository john-wilmes/claude-agentic-coding-playbook (4 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 82 tokens to every session and 6,518 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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