research

research is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from JuliusBrussee/cavekit. It costs 116 tokens per session (804 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research process for checking outside facts about libraries, APIs, software practices, and other technical subjects before building.

In plain words
What is it for?
Answering focused technical questions, checking dependencies and APIs, and documenting research needed for a software specification.
Why use it?
It prevents plans from relying on guesses about how external tools work. Findings are recorded with sources, while uncertain claims are marked as unknown.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the ck plugin — 8 skills, 7 commands 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/juliusbrussee/cavekit/research
Any agent
npx skills add JuliusBrussee/cavekit --skill research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/cavekit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install ck, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills, 7 commands.

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 research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/juliusbrussee/cavekit/research.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliusbrussee/cavekit/research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliusbrussee/cavekit/research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/juliusbrussee/cavekit/research.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 116 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 804 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 $0.00116 $0.00804
Opus 5 $0.00058 $0.00402
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00161
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00080

Measured 4d ago against content hash 35aefc7b84f7, 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 4d 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.

skills/research/SKILL.md · 73 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 73 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

research — external knowledge → §R

Every finding cites a source. No source → flag it ?, never write a guess as fact.

"Process without library context gives you well-organized hallucinations." Build invents a plausible-but-wrong API & §B fills with avoidable bugs. Research is the external oracle: pull the real fact once, log it caveman, never re-derive.

WHEN TO RESEARCH

  • A §C/§I/§V decision hinges on a lib, API, version, or pattern you are unsure of.
  • You are about to assume how an external dependency behaves.
  • The idea touches a domain with real prior art (auth, payments, crypto, rate-limit).
  • /grill parked a ? that the outside world must answer.

Skip when the build touches only code you already wrote. Research scales to the unknown, ⊥ to habit.

FOUR STEPS

1. SCOPE

Turn the unknown into 1-3 concrete questions. Vague "research auth" → "JWT lib for Node ESM, maintained?" + "refresh-token rotation: current best practice?". A scoped question gets a citable answer; a vague one gets an essay.

2. GATHER

Use web search / docs tools. Prefer primary sources: official docs, the repo, the RFC, the paper. Two independent sources beat one confident blog. For a big sweep, spawn a sub-agent so the raw pages never touch this context — it returns only the distilled finding + source.

3. DISTILL

Crush each answer to one caveman line + its source. Drop the prose. The §R row is the memory; the tab you read is not.

R3|refresh token|rotate on use, revoke family on reuse-detect|datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6819#section-5.2.2.3

4. HAND OFF

Emit the §R rows & hand to the spec skill to append. If a finding changes a constraint or interface, note the §C/§I edit for spec too. Research proposes; spec writes.

SOURCE DISCIPLINE

  • Cite a URL, repo, RFC, or paper per row. Verbatim identifiers/versions.
  • Could not verify → write the row but flag ? in the finding & say so. An unverified claim labeled honestly is fine; one disguised as fact is a future §B.
  • Conflicting sources → log both, let the user pick. ⊥ silently average them.

Read the full file on GitHub · 73 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. 4d ago First seen · 73 lines · 116 tokens per session scan A 35aefc7b84f7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a skill published in the GitHub repository JuliusBrussee/cavekit (1,142 stars, last pushed 20d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 116 tokens to every session and 804 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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