auto-research

auto-research is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from maystudios/claude-skills. It costs 234 tokens per session (2,692 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A procedure for improving an existing Claude Code skill, instruction file, agent definition, slash command, or prompt by researching current practices and testing the rewrite. Claude Code is a coding assistant that can use these instruction files to guide its work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to modernize or optimize files such as SKILL.md, CLAUDE.md, subagent definitions, slash commands, and other prompt Markdown files.
Why use it?
It turns a vague improvement request into a repeatable process with research, measurable checks, and a final review before writing changes. It also handles the different validation needs of testable and non-testable prompt files.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents.

Good fit Use it to modernize or optimize files such as SKILL.md, CLAUDE.md, subagent definitions, slash commands, and other prompt Markdown files.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/maystudios/claude-skills/auto-research
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 maystudios/claude-skills --skill auto-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/maystudios/claude-skills

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 auto-research

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/maystudios/claude-skills/auto-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/maystudios/claude-skills/auto-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 234 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,692 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. 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: 2 findings, 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 Rogue Agent · line 3
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Excessive Agency · line 164
    Skill allows unbounded resource consumption (API calls, storage, compute). Without rate limits or quotas, a compromised or misbehaving agent can cause denial-of-service or cost overruns.
    Fix: Set explicit rate limits, timeouts, and resource quotas for API calls, file operations, and compute. Implement circuit breakers for runaway loops.
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 $0.00234 $0.02692
Opus 5 $0.00117 $0.01346
Sonnet 5 $0.00047 $0.00538
Haiku 4.5 $0.00023 $0.00269

Measured 9d ago against content hash 033488c373a6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

auto-research 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 9d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/score_evals.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

auto-research/SKILL.md · 183 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 183 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Auto-Research

Improve a target prompt artifact (SKILL.md, CLAUDE.md, subagent definition, slash-command, or generic prompt markdown) by:

  1. Detecting the artifact type and the rules that apply to it
  2. Researching current authoritative best practices in parallel — every claim cited
  3. Proposing a rewrite with per-change rationale and source URLs
  4. Validating the rewrite — for testable artifacts, an autonomous Karpathy-style binary-assertion eval loop with git commit/reset bookkeeping; for non-testable artifacts, deterministic format validation
  5. Confirming once at the very end with a before/after score table, the diff, and the cited sources — only the user's explicit "yes" causes the final write

Run autonomously between steps 1 and 4. Stop only at step 5.


Phase 0 — Read Inputs and Set Up Workspace

The user will name a target artifact (a path, or a phrase like "my copywriting skill" — resolve it). Resolution rules:

  • If a path is given, use it.
  • If a skill name is given, search .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (project) then ~/.claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (user).
  • If "this CLAUDE.md" or similar, use the most-specific one in the current working directory tree (project > user).

Then:

  1. Read the target artifact in full.
  2. Classify it via references/artifact-types.md: SKILL.md / CLAUDE.md / subagent / slash-command / generic-prompt.
  3. Set up the workspace — a sibling directory .auto-research/<target-name>/ next to the target. If the target's parent directory is not under git, run git init there so commit/reset bookkeeping works locally. (If the user's project root has its own git repo and the target lives inside it, use the existing repo — do NOT init a sub-repo.)
  4. Capture baseline — copy the original artifact to .auto-research/<target-name>/iteration-0/baseline.md and record git rev (git rev-parse HEAD if available, else "untracked").
  5. Create iterations.tsv with columns: iter | hypothesis | score_before | score_after | decision | git_rev | timestamp | notes.

Read the full file on GitHub · 183 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 9d ago First seen · 183 lines · 234 tokens per session scan A 033488c373a6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

auto-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository maystudios/claude-skills (22 stars, last pushed 25d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 234 tokens to every session and 2,692 once invoked, about $0.0012 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.

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