Scientific Agent Skills is a collection of reusable procedures that give AI agents capabilities for scientific research across areas such as biology, chemistry, medicine, and drug discovery. It is used by researchers and by people building AI scientist workflows with compatible coding agents. The catalogue contains many of the project's skills and supporting instructions.
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 K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills --skill exa-searchgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skillsWrote 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/k-dense-ai/scientific-agent-skills/exa-search)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/k-dense-ai/scientific-agent-skills/exa-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/k-dense-ai/scientific-agent-skills/exa-search/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/k-dense-ai/scientific-agent-skills/exa-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/k-dense-ai/scientific-agent-skills/exa-search.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket pass
- Snyk warn
- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- high Privilege Escalation · line 77 Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
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 | $0.00116 | $0.01189 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00058 | $0.00594 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00023 | $0.00238 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00012 | $0.00119 |
Grade A, and why
exa-search 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 12d 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.
Copies of this mod
7 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:
- exa-search — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- exa-search — 95% identical, 15 lines differ
- exa-search — 95% identical, 15 lines differ
- exa-search — 95% identical, 15 lines differ
- exa-search — 94% identical, 11 lines differ
- exa-search — 94% identical, 10 lines differ
- exa-search — 92% identical, 15 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 103 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Exa Web Toolkit
A skill for web-powered research tasks backed by Exa: web search and URL extraction. Exa's index combines high-quality keyword and semantic retrieval, which makes it well-suited to scientific, technical, and conceptual queries.
Routing — pick the right capability
Read the user's request and match it to one of the capabilities below. Read the corresponding reference file for detailed instructions before running commands.
| User wants to... | Capability | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Look something up, research a topic, find current info | Web Search | references/web-search.md |
| Fetch content from a specific URL (webpage, article, PDF) | Web Extract | references/web-extract.md |
| Install or authenticate | Setup | Below |
Decision guide
- Default to Web Search for topic lookups, research questions, or "what is X?" queries. When the topic is scientific or technical, pass
--category "research paper"to bias toward scholarly sources, and/or an academic--include-domainsallowlist. Seereferences/web-search.mdfor the two-pass academic strategy. - Use Web Extract when the user provides a URL or asks you to read/fetch a specific page. Prefer this over the built-in WebFetch for batch extraction (multiple URLs in one call) and for academic PDFs.
Academic source priority
For technical or scientific queries, prefer academic and scientific sources:
- Peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings over blog posts or news
- Preprints (arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv) when peer-reviewed versions aren't available
- Institutional and government sources (NIH, WHO, NASA, NIST) over commercial sites
- Primary research over secondary summaries
Two levers to steer Exa toward scholarly content:
--category "research paper"biases retrieval toward scholarly sources.--include-domainswith a scholarly allowlist (arxiv.org, nature.com, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, etc.) restricts the domain pool.
Combine both for strictly academic results. See references/web-search.md for the full pattern.
What ships with it
4 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.
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.
- 12d ago First seen · 103 lines · 116 tokens per session scan A 1986353174a6
exa-search is a skill published in the GitHub repository K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills (44,469 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 116 tokens to every session and 1,189 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
discovery-toolbox
A routed repertoire of 90 scientific thinking operators for biological research agents - visual reasoning, detectability and information budgets, search reframing, causal identification, competing explanations, observation and selection processes, pipeline artifact diagnosis, effort allocation, and confirmation…
discovery-director
Operate as a research director making original discoveries from a given biological question and dataset. Use when the task is open-ended scientific research, exploring omics or experimental data for findings, hypothesis generation and testing, screening a large candidate space of genes, variants, features or…
inbound-lead-enrichment
Fills in missing data for inbound leads — researches the company, identifies the person's role and seniority, finds other stakeholders at the company, checks for existing CRM relationships, and updates the lead record. Produces enriched lead data ready for qualification or outreach. Tool-agnostic.
demo-builder
Builds personalized demo assets for top prospects using the founder's product API/MCP/SDK. Researches prospect, proposes demo concepts, builds working prototype, tests it, and generates comparison report with live demo link.
create-imessage-mockup
Render pixel-accurate iMessage screenshot mockups (DM or group) from a thread JSON. Supports minimal, with-keyboard, and full iPhone 15 Pro frame variants. Outputs HTML + PNG.
industry-scanner
Daily industry intelligence scanner. Scans web, social media, news, blogs, and communities for industry-relevant events, trends, and signals. Produces a comprehensive intelligence briefing plus strategic GTM opportunity ideas. Orchestrates existing scraping skills — does not reimplement data collection.