topic-research

topic-research is a skill for Claude Code from naveedharri/benai-skills. It costs 223 tokens per session (2,378 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided research workflow that produces a sourced Markdown brief and a human-readable HTML report. It gathers evidence, checks factual claims, separates facts from opinions, and adapts the work to the user's purpose.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps research a topic, compare evidence, prepare a briefing, or gather verified material before writing content.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of producing a generic or poorly supported research report by defining the goal first and checking important claims before publication.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the benai-marketing plugin — 13 skills shipped together

Good fit It helps research a topic, compare evidence, prepare a briefing, or gather verified material before writing content.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install benai-marketing, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 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 topic-research

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/naveedharri/benai-skills/topic-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/naveedharri/benai-skills/topic-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 223 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,378 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: 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 Memory Poisoning · line 112
    Skill injects content designed to persist in agent memory or context across interactions. Persistent injection can alter agent behavior long after the initial interaction.
    Fix: Do not allow untrusted input to persist in agent memory or context. Validate all content before storing and implement memory isolation between sessions.
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 $0.00223 $0.02378
Opus 5 $0.00112 $0.01189
Sonnet 5 $0.00045 $0.00476
Haiku 4.5 $0.00022 $0.00238

Measured 7d ago against content hash 3259a818f8c7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

topic-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 7d 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.

plugins/benai-marketing/skills/topic-research/SKILL.md · 115 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 115 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Topic Research

Turns a topic into a rigorous, sourced, fact-checked report. Two artifacts come out every time: a markdown brief (agent-readable, the handoff to a content-writer skill) and a branded HTML report (human-facing, deployable). The workflow is: interview the user so the research is targeted, fan out parallel research sub-agents across source types, verify every hard claim, synthesize to markdown, render to HTML, deploy.

[!important] The two rules that make this good

  1. Targeted, not generic. The Phase 0 Q&A shapes every sub-agent. Research aimed at a purpose beats a topic dump every time.
  2. Verify before you publish. No hard number reaches the report without a fact-check verdict and a caveat. Fact and opinion stay visibly separate.

Phase 0: Targeted Q&A + capability probe

Do both before any research runs. Ask conversationally, one thing at a time, adapting to answers.

A. Targeted Q&A (this shapes the whole run)

  1. Topic, and what they already believe or suspect about it.
  2. Purpose: is this to write a specific piece of content (which format? which audience?), to make a decision, to brief a team, to prep for a talk? A content purpose changes what the report emphasizes and how the markdown is structured downstream.
  3. Angle / biases / skepticism to reflect: a point of view they want the research to support or pressure-test, claims they are suspicious of, hot takes to stress-test. These become explicit search directives for the sub-agents. If they have none, the research stays neutral and simply reports the tension it finds.
  4. Depth: Quick / Standard / Deep (see below).
  5. Output: report + markdown always; deploy target is a Claude live artifact (instant, no infra) or Vercel (stable custom URL). Ask which.
  6. Brand: default to the neo-brutalist "Signal Report" look in assets/report-template.html. If they have a brand (site, design system, colors/fonts/logo), extract and restyle; the CSS is token-driven at the top of the template.

Read the full file on GitHub · 115 lines

Files

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.

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. 7d ago First seen · 115 lines · 223 tokens per session scan A 3259a818f8c7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

topic-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository naveedharri/benai-skills (61 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 223 tokens to every session and 2,378 once invoked, about $0.0011 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 2026-09-05.

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