octopus-research

octopus-research is a skill for Claude Code from nyldn/claude-octopus. It costs 19 tokens per session (1,890 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research process for investigating a topic across multiple sources. It begins by asking how much depth and what focus the research should have.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for technical research, best-practice reviews, ecosystem and tool research, or comparisons of trade-offs.
Why use it?
It helps match the research effort to the question and keeps broad investigations focused on a chosen area.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter. Also seen: agent in frontmatter; reads .claude/ paths; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the octo plugin — 70 skills, 106 commands, 10 agents, 18 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it for technical research, best-practice reviews, ecosystem and tool research, or comparisons of trade-offs.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-deep-research
About the project

Claude Octopus is an orchestration project that sends research, design, and coding tasks to Claude Code and other AI model providers so their results can be compared. Developers use it for multi-model work, disagreement detection, reviews, persistent context, and an optional workflow that moves from discovery through delivery. The catalogue entries are its commands, skills, agents, instructions, hooks, plugins, and settings.

nyldn/claude-octopus · 4,058 stars · on GitHub · reddit.com

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 nyldn/claude-octopus --skill skill-deep-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nyldn/claude-octopus

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install octo, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 70 skills, 106 commands, 10 agents, 18 hooks.

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 octopus-research

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-deep-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-deep-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 19 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,890 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 Rogue Agent · line 201
    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.
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 $0.00019 $0.01890
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00945
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00378
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00189

Measured 10d ago against content hash be31c86f8c89, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

octopus-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 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.

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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

.claude/skills/skill-deep-research/SKILL.md · 231 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 231 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

⚠️ EXECUTION CONTRACT (MANDATORY - CANNOT SKIP)

This skill uses ENFORCED execution mode. You MUST follow this exact sequence.

STEP 1: Interactive Questions (BLOCKING - Answer before proceeding)

You MUST call AskUserQuestion with all 3 questions below BEFORE any other action.

AskUserQuestion({
  questions: [
    {
      question: "How deep should the research go?",
      header: "Research Depth",
      multiSelect: false,
      options: [
        {label: "Quick overview (Recommended)", description: "1-2 min, surface-level"},
        {label: "Moderate depth", description: "2-3 min, standard"},
        {label: "Comprehensive", description: "3-4 min, thorough"},
        {label: "Deep dive", description: "4-5 min, exhaustive"}
      ]
    },
    {
      question: "What's your primary focus area?",
      header: "Primary Focus",
      multiSelect: false,
      options: [
        {label: "Technical implementation (Recommended)", description: "Code patterns, APIs"},
        {label: "Best practices", description: "Industry standards"},
        {label: "Ecosystem & tools", description: "Libraries, community"},
        {label: "Trade-offs & comparisons", description: "Pros/cons analysis"}
      ]
    },
    {
      question: "How should the output be formatted?",
      header: "Output Format",
      multiSelect: false,
      options: [
        {label: "Detailed report (Recommended)", description: "Comprehensive write-up"},
        {label: "Summary", description: "Concise findings"},
        {label: "Comparison table", description: "Side-by-side analysis"},
        {label: "Recommendations", description: "Actionable next steps"}
      ]
    }
  ]
})

Read the full file on GitHub · 231 lines

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 · 231 lines · 19 tokens per session scan A be31c86f8c89

Subscribe to this mod's changes

octopus-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository nyldn/claude-octopus (4,058 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 19 tokens to every session and 1,890 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 2026-08-30.

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