AI Research Skills Library is a collection of reusable instructions that guide AI agents through research and machine-learning engineering tasks, from finding ideas and writing papers to training, evaluation, and deployment. It is for configuring agents such as Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini to perform research workflows.
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.
npx skills add Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs --skill transformer-lensgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills/transformer-lens)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills/transformer-lens"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills/transformer-lens/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills/transformer-lens"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills/transformer-lens.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00052 | $0.03056 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00026 | $0.01528 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00010 | $0.00611 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00306 |
Grade A, and why
transformer-lens-interpretability 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 13d 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.
This is a copy
100% identical to transformer-lens-interpretability — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 347 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
TransformerLens: Mechanistic Interpretability for Transformers
TransformerLens is the de facto standard library for mechanistic interpretability research on GPT-style language models. Created by Neel Nanda and maintained by Bryce Meyer, it provides clean interfaces to inspect and manipulate model internals via HookPoints on every activation.
GitHub: TransformerLensOrg/TransformerLens (2,900+ stars)
When to Use TransformerLens
Use TransformerLens when you need to:
- Reverse-engineer algorithms learned during training
- Perform activation patching / causal tracing experiments
- Study attention patterns and information flow
- Analyze circuits (e.g., induction heads, IOI circuit)
- Cache and inspect intermediate activations
- Apply direct logit attribution
Consider alternatives when:
- You need to work with non-transformer architectures → Use nnsight or pyvene
- You want to train/analyze Sparse Autoencoders → Use SAELens
- You need remote execution on massive models → Use nnsight with NDIF
- You want higher-level causal intervention abstractions → Use pyvene
Installation
pip install transformer-lens
For development version:
pip install git+https://github.com/TransformerLensOrg/TransformerLens
Core Concepts
HookedTransformer
The main class that wraps transformer models with HookPoints on every activation:
from transformer_lens import HookedTransformer
# Load a model
model = HookedTransformer.from_pretrained("gpt2-small")
# For gated models (LLaMA, Mistral)
import os
os.environ["HF_TOKEN"] = "your_token"
model = HookedTransformer.from_pretrained("meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-hf")
Supported Models (50+)
| Family | Models |
|---|---|
| GPT-2 | gpt2, gpt2-medium, gpt2-large, gpt2-xl |
| LLaMA | llama-7b, llama-13b, llama-2-7b, llama-2-13b |
| EleutherAI | pythia-70m to pythia-12b, gpt-neo, gpt-j-6b |
| Mistral | mistral-7b, mixtral-8x7b |
| Others | phi, qwen, opt, gemma |
What ships with it
3 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.
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.
- 13d ago First seen · 347 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A 9ac5a790a59f
transformer-lens-interpretability is a skill published in the GitHub repository Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs (12,567 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 3,056 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to transformer-lens-interpretability, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.
Other skills, from other repositories
transformer-lens-interpretability
Provides guidance for mechanistic interpretability research using TransformerLens to inspect and manipulate transformer internals via HookPoints and activation caching. Use when reverse-engineering model algorithms, studying attention patterns, or performing activation patching experiments.
transformer-lens-interpretability
Provides guidance for mechanistic interpretability research using TransformerLens to inspect and manipulate transformer internals via HookPoints and activation caching. Use when reverse-engineering model algorithms, studying attention patterns, or performing activation patching experiments.
transformer-lens-interpretability
Provides guidance for mechanistic interpretability research using TransformerLens to inspect and manipulate transformer internals via HookPoints and activation caching. Use when reverse-engineering model algorithms, studying attention patterns, or performing activation patching experiments.
transformer-lens-interpretability
Provides guidance for mechanistic interpretability research using TransformerLens to inspect and manipulate transformer internals via HookPoints and activation caching. Use when reverse-engineering model algorithms, studying attention patterns, or performing activation patching experiments.
transformer-lens-interpretability
Provides guidance for mechanistic interpretability research using TransformerLens to inspect and manipulate transformer internals via HookPoints and activation caching. Use when reverse-engineering model algorithms, studying attention patterns, or performing activation patching experiments.
sparse-autoencoder-training
Provides guidance for training and analyzing Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) using SAELens to decompose neural network activations into interpretable features. Use when discovering interpretable features, analyzing superposition, or studying monosemantic representations in language models.