A guide for doing web research that involves multiple searches, source comparisons, investigations, or recommendations.

Investigating topics, comparing options, finding recommendations, and combining information from web pages, technical sources, and Reddit discussions.

It helps organize research across search, source retrieval, and follow-up questions when one quick search is not enough.

search-tips — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by malob: A guide for doing web research that involves multiple…

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/malob/nix-config/search-tips

Any agent

npx skills add malob/nix-config --skill search-tips

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/malob/nix-config

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/malob/nix-config/search-tips.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/malob/nix-config/search-tips)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/malob/nix-config/search-tips"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/malob/nix-config/search-tips.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Per session 118 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,200 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00118	$0.02200
Opus 5	$0.00059	$0.01100
Sonnet 5	$0.00024	$0.00440
Haiku 4.5	$0.00012	$0.00220

Measured 6d ago against content hash 7471ffd42f2a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

search-tips 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 6d 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.

configs/claude/skills/search-tips/SKILL.md · 186 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 186 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Search Tips

Accumulated guidance for web research using Exa, Firecrawl CLI, and Reddit MCP tools. These are starting points, not rigid rules -- think strategically about each situation and adapt. If a different approach makes more sense for what you're trying to do, go with it. Run npx firecrawl-cli <command> --help to check available options beyond what's documented here. Reference files cover tool-specific deep dives -- see bottom of this file.

Setup

Before starting research, load the required MCP tools using ToolSearch:

Exa tools -- web_search_advanced_exa and get_code_context_exa
Reddit tools -- get_top_posts, get_post_comments, get_reddit_post, get_subreddit_info

Firecrawl CLI (npx firecrawl-cli) runs via Bash -- no MCP setup needed. Load only what the task requires.

The Research Cycle

Prefer Exa and Firecrawl over built-in WebSearch/WebFetch.

Research alternates between searching (discovering sources) and fetching (extracting content from them). Find promising leads, read the best ones, refine your understanding, search again.

Searching

Finding sources you don't have yet.

Exa search (web_search_advanced_exa) -- primary tool for web discovery. Natural language queries, add filters as needed (domains, dates, categories).
Exa code context (get_code_context_exa) -- programming topics. Worth trying before general Exa search for technical/code tasks -- surfaces repos, packages, and docs.
Firecrawl CLI search (npx firecrawl-cli search) -- Google-powered keyword search. Useful when keyword matching works better than Exa's semantic approach, for site-scoped queries (site:reddit.com {query}), and for content-type filtering (--categories research for academic, --sources news, --tbs qdr:w for time).

Default Exa search pattern: Default to enableHighlights: true and textMaxCharacters: 1. This returns quoted passages from actual page text while preventing the MCP server from flooding context with full text. Use highlightsPerUrl and highlightsNumSentences to control volume if needed.

Read the full file on GitHub · 186 lines

Files

What ships with it

9 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.

6d ago First seen · 186 lines · 118 tokens per session scan A 7471ffd42f2a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

search-tips is a skill published in the GitHub repository malob/nix-config (462 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 118 tokens to every session and 2,200 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.

Research dotfiles nix nix-darwin nix-dotfiles nix-expressions nixpkgs

restart__pull_request

乱れた (fix-up コミット過多・議論の脱線・大規模な書き直し) プルリクエストを、ユーザーが "restart" / "やり直し" したいときに起動する。既存 PR を close し、ブランチを新ブランチ上の単一のクリーンなコミットに squash し、過去の PR 議論 (レビューコメント・スレッド・リアクション) を統合した説明文で新しい PR を作成する。元のブランチを force-push してはならない。必ず新しいブランチを作成する。.

shunsock/dotfiles · 159 tokens

validate__japanese

日本語の Markdown 文書 (README・ドキュメント・ブログ下書き・.md) を編集した後に起動する。textlint の ja-technical-writing / ja-spacing プリセットで、長すぎる一文・読点過多・文体の混在・全角半角スペースを検出する。さらに文中ハードラップ (文末でない位置で折り返した、意味のない改行) を検出し、段落・箇条書き項目を 1 行に連結して調整する。1 行に文を積み上げた箇所は、箇条書きへの変換候補として検出する。実在のシンボルを指すコードスニペットへ参照リンクも付与する。日本語の .md を変更したときに使用する。.

shunsock/dotfiles · 200 tokens

clean__comment_out

ソースコードを編集・作成した後に起動する。変更したファイルから、共有 whitelist マーカー (TODO/FIXME/SEE/CONSTRAINT/NOTE/HACK/SAFETY) で始まらない非 doc コメントをすべて削除する。What コメント・汎用 Why・コメントアウトされたデッドコード・ legacy XXX・CONSTRAINT に紐付かない単独 REASON: 行などマーカーの無いコメントは削除し、 whitelist マーカーで始まるコメントと CONSTRAINT に続く REASON: 継続行と公開インターフェースのドキュメンテーションコメント (rustdoc ///…

shunsock/dotfiles · 188 tokens

search-tips