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 | $0.00061 | $0.01502 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00024 | $0.00601 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00012 | $0.00300 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00150 |
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 26d 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
8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:
- exa-search — 100% identical, 52 lines differ
- exa-search — 100% identical, 52 lines differ
- exa-search — 95% identical, 63 lines differ
- exa-search — 95% identical, 63 lines differ
- exa-search — 95% identical, 63 lines differ
- exa-search — 94% identical, 58 lines differ
- exa-search — 94% identical, 59 lines differ
- exa-search — 92% identical, 63 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 131 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 publicationto 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 publicationbiases 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 to narrow the source pool; verify publication type and peer-review status on each source. 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.
- 26d ago Changed · +17 lines · -55 tokens per session 8cdedf564878
- 27d ago Changed · +11 lines 18cc66f1f8c3
- 1mo 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 (54,953 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 61 tokens to every session and 1,502 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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
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discovery-director
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create-video-seedance-2-fal
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meta-ad-manager
Front door and loop owner of a Meta (Facebook/Instagram) ad harness. Reads the brand's ads/ docs, works out which campaign the user means and which stage it is at, hands off to the stage skill that runs it (intake, strategy, creative, launch, checks, fixes, answers), and writes every stage change back to the docs. Use…
run-memory
Shared step of the marketing playbooks (analyze-performance, run-paid-campaigns, research-competitors, email-lifecycle): reads the last run's record, checks whether its recommendations were done and whether they worked, and saves a short record of this run for the next one. Loaded by those playbooks; not for direct…
render-imessage-chat
Render a configurable iMessage conversation inside a properly framed phone, then a brand end card. Uses the original send/receive sounds and a shared frame timeline for text, typing, scrolling and sound. Free local Playwright + ffmpeg assembly; optional image/music generation belongs to separate gated capabilities.