lit-rescue

lit-rescue is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Kdevos12/ALKYL. It costs 57 tokens per session (1,612 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A literature-searching aid for difficult technical questions, using research papers and sources such as PubMed and bioRxiv. PubMed indexes biomedical studies, while bioRxiv is a site for research papers shared before peer review.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate unfamiliar algorithms, typical parameter values, unexpected errors, scientific explanations, experimental protocols, or benchmark comparisons.
Why use it?
It helps ground answers in published or publicly shared research when a method, parameter, protocol, or software behavior is uncertain.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the alkyl plugin — 27 skills 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/kdevos12/alkyl/lit-rescue
Any agent
npx skills add Kdevos12/ALKYL --skill lit-rescue
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Kdevos12/ALKYL

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install alkyl, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 27 skills.

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 lit-rescue

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kdevos12/alkyl/lit-rescue.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kdevos12/alkyl/lit-rescue)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kdevos12/alkyl/lit-rescue"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kdevos12/alkyl/lit-rescue.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 57 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,612 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 $0.00057 $0.01612
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00806
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00322
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00161

Measured 4d ago against content hash 8129b0005be9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

lit-rescue 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/lit-rescue/SKILL.md · 184 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 184 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Lit-Rescue — Literature-Grounded Problem Solving

When to invoke this skill:

  • No confident answer exists from training knowledge
  • The problem involves a specific algorithm, parameter, protocol, or library behavior that could be misremembered
  • Previous attempts at solving the problem have been inconsistent or failed
  • The question is novel, niche, or at the edge of a domain
  • The user is debugging something that "shouldn't happen"

Rule: If there is >20% chance the answer could be fabricated or outdated → invoke this skill first.


Step 1 — Classify the Problem

Identify the query type before formulating search queries:

Type Keywords Primary MCP
METHOD "which algorithm", "best approach for", "how to compute X" Perplexity → bioRxiv
PARAM "what value for", "typical hyperparameters", "threshold for" Perplexity → PubMed
BUG "why does X fail", "unexpected behavior", "error in library" Perplexity only
THEORY "physical basis of", "why does X work", "derivation" PubMed → bioRxiv
PROTOCOL "standard procedure", "step-by-step for", "pipeline for" bioRxiv → PubMed
BENCHMARK "comparison of methods", "state of the art for", "which is better" bioRxiv → PubMed
DOMAIN highly specialized jargon or niche subfield Perplexity → PubMed

Multiple types can apply — activate each relevant search.


Step 2 — Formulate Queries

Load references/perplexity-prompts.md if Perplexity MCP is available.

Otherwise, construct queries following these principles:

  1. Be maximally specific — include library name + version, domain, and exact task
  2. Ask for citations — request DOIs, paper titles, or package documentation references
  3. Anchor to peer-reviewed content — explicitly exclude opinion/blog content for scientific questions
  4. Specify recency — for fast-moving fields, constrain to last 2–3 years

Step 3 — Execute Search Waterfall

Read the full file on GitHub · 184 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. 4d ago First seen · 184 lines · 57 tokens per session scan A 8129b0005be9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

lit-rescue is a skill published in the GitHub repository Kdevos12/ALKYL (6 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 1,612 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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