spec-research

spec-research is a skill for Claude Code from sauravvarma/garage. It costs 175 tokens per session (3,916 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research skill that fills in missing details in a feature plan before coding or testing begins. It maps the different states a page can have and points out nearby decisions the plan has not covered.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to draft page-state tables, identify gaps in charts, units, categories, wording, permissions, and differences between the design and the code.
Why use it?
It helps prevent developers from building only the happy path when the plan is vague, old, or incomplete.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md.

Part of the garage plugin — 6 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to draft page-state tables, identify gaps in charts, units, categories, wording, permissions, and differences between the design and the code.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install garage, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 1 hook.

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 spec-research

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sauravvarma/garage/spec-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sauravvarma/garage/spec-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 175 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,916 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.
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 $0.00175 $0.03916
Opus 5 $0.00088 $0.01958
Sonnet 5 $0.00035 $0.00783
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00392

Measured 9d ago against content hash 4eee01bc5fe8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

spec-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.

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/spec-research/SKILL.md · 205 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 205 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

spec-research — turn a thin spec into a reviewable draft

This skill exists because most "the AI shipped the wrong thing" bugs aren't coding bugs — they're scoping bugs. The spec described the happy path; nobody enumerated the empty / error / role-gated / mid-fetch branches; the code shipped what was described. /spec-research is the spec-completion phase between scaffolding (/spec-first-project-setup) and implementation (/code-agent).

The output is always a proposal, never a unilateral edit. The user accepts/edits/rejects rows. The skill does the research so the user can review, not the other way around.

When to invoke

Invoke directly whenever an IDEAS doc is missing detail you'd need to implement or QA against. Also invoked indirectly: /code-agent and /visual-qa route here when their preflights detect a thin spec.

Typical triggers:

  • "The IDEAS doc has no Page states table — derive one."
  • "We're porting Sleep Insights from mweb — read the source and reconcile against the IDEAS doc."
  • "This feature has only 2 locked decisions; what else needs to be locked before I can implement?"
  • "This route's IDEAS doc was written 3 commits ago — has it drifted from the code?"

If the IDEAS doc doesn't exist at all, route the user to /spec-first-project-setup to scaffold it first; this skill fills, it doesn't scaffold.

Inputs

  • Required: path to a [FEATURE]-IDEAS.md in the project (or the project root + a feature name to fuzzy-match).
  • Required: project root with CLAUDE.md and docs/REPO-CONVENTIONS.md — to know the data flow, parser rules, token system.
  • Optional but high-value:
    • Source file or directory to port from (mweb component, legacy app, etc.)
    • API contract documentation or example responses
    • Sibling IDEAS docs in the same route family (shared decisions cross-reference)
    • Design comp (Pencil, Figma) — read structure, not just visuals

If the IDEAS doc references mweb / a legacy source and that source isn't readable, ask the user for a pointer before proceeding. Don't guess what the source renders.

Read the full file on GitHub · 205 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. 9d ago First seen · 205 lines · 175 tokens per session scan A 4eee01bc5fe8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

spec-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository sauravvarma/garage (3 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 175 tokens to every session and 3,916 once invoked, about $0.0009 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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