deep-research

A research workflow for checking outside information such as application programming interfaces, software libraries, recommended practices, and existing solutions before planning or coding.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when a development task needs web research before implementation. It produces a short summary and a saved report based on multiple sources.
Why use it?
It helps avoid relying on outdated or unsupported assumptions when a task depends on external information. It also records source links and notes disagreements between sources.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/nirecom/agents/deep-research
Any agent
npx skills add nirecom/agents --skill deep-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nirecom/agents

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 27 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 397 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 $0.00027 $0.00397
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00198
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00079
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00040

Measured 2d ago against content hash ee5b0ea21cbf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

deep-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 2d 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/deep-research/SKILL.md · 40 lines

What it actually says

Investigate external information related to the given task.

Procedure

DR-1. Delegate to web-researcher:

Agent({ subagent_type: "web-researcher", prompt: JSON.stringify({
  topic: TOPIC, context: CONTEXT,
  artifact_dir: PLANS_DIR
}) })

On failed status: surface summary to user and stop.

DR-2. Read the report from artifact_path (one read, at the end). DR-3. Present findings — output format: ## Deep Research: PERFORMED|FAILED (1 line) + artifact_path pointer (1 line) + ≤200 char summary. Do not re-emit the full report text in assistant output. The caller must not re-summarize or paraphrase these findings — DR-3 output is the complete user-facing surface.

Rules

  • Do not modify any project files
  • Always include source URLs for traceability
  • Prefer primary sources (official docs, RFCs) over blog posts
  • When sources contradict each other, report both sides instead of choosing one

Completion

After completing this skill:

  1. Run: echo "<<WORKFLOW_MARK_STEP_research_complete>>" (must be the ENTIRE Bash command — no pipes, no && chaining, no redirection)

Skip this skill when no external knowledge is needed (e.g., the task is purely internal to the codebase).

If research is genuinely not needed for this task:

  1. Run: echo "<<WORKFLOW_RESEARCH_NOT_NEEDED: {reason}>>" (reason must be ≥3 non-space chars, not a placeholder like "none"/"skip", and contain no '>')
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. 2d ago First seen · 40 lines · 27 tokens per session scan A ee5b0ea21cbf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

deep-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository nirecom/agents (3 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 27 tokens to every session and 397 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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