web-research

web-research is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from laude-institute/headlong. It costs 32 tokens per session (403 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guide for researching topics on the internet with command-line tools such as curl. It explains how to fetch pages, search the web, extract text, retrieve JSON, and download files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to look up topics, read web pages, query online data sources, and download files while limiting and pacing requests.
Why use it?
It provides a repeatable approach for gathering current information when the answer is not already available locally.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to look up topics, read web pages, query online data sources, and download files while limiting and pacing requests.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/laude-institute/headlong/web-research
About the project

Headlong is a Bash-based agent microharness for running language-model agents in persistent, self-directed loops. People use it to create agents that maintain ongoing interests and projects, interact through shell commands, and share one stream of conversations across a team and chat services.

laude-institute/headlong · 1,144 stars · on GitHub · headlong.ai

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 laude-institute/headlong --skill web-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/laude-institute/headlong

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 web-research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/laude-institute/headlong/web-research/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/laude-institute/headlong/web-research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/laude-institute/headlong/web-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/laude-institute/headlong/web-research/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 web-research

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/laude-institute/headlong/web-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/laude-institute/headlong/web-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 32 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 403 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

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 →

  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 38
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00032 $0.00403
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00201
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00081
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00040

Measured 10d ago against content hash 51cee33b3add, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

web-research scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 10d 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

description: Research topics using the web via curl. Use when the user asks to look something up, find current information, or research a topic online.
skills/web-research/SKILL.md · 54 lines

What it actually says

web-research

When to use

User asks to look something up, find current information, research a topic, or answer a question that requires up-to-date knowledge beyond what you have in context.

Common operations

Fetch a web page

curl -sL "https://example.com" | head -200

Search via DuckDuckGo (HTML)

query="your search terms"
curl -sL "https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=$(printf '%s' "$query" | jq -sRr @uri)" \
  | grep -oP 'href="https?://[^"]*"' | head -10

Fetch and extract text from HTML

# Strip HTML tags for readable text
curl -sL "$url" | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' | sed '/^$/d' | head -100

Fetch JSON APIs

curl -s "https://api.example.com/endpoint" | jq '.results[]'

Download a file

curl -sLO "https://example.com/file.txt"

Tips

  • Always use -s (silent) and -L (follow redirects) with curl
  • Pipe HTML through sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' for rough text extraction
  • Use head or tail to limit output — full web pages are huge
  • For JavaScript-heavy sites, raw curl won't render dynamic content
  • Rate-limit requests — don't hammer endpoints in tight loops
  • Check robots.txt before scraping extensively
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. 10d ago First seen · 54 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A 51cee33b3add

Subscribe to this mod's changes

web-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository laude-institute/headlong (1,144 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 403 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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