Getting it into your agent
It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/SethGammon/Citadelnpx agentmods add skills/sethgammon/citadel/researchWrote 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/sethgammon/citadel/research)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethgammon/citadel/research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sethgammon/citadel/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethgammon/citadel/research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sethgammon/citadel/research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
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 Excessive Agency · line 278 Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 | $0.00067 | $0.03057 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00027 | $0.01223 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00013 | $0.00611 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00306 |
Grade A, and why
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 1mo 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 322 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
/research — Focused Investigation
When to Use
- Evaluating whether a dependency has a newer version or has been superseded
- Finding community best practices for a specific technical problem
- Reading official documentation for an API or library
- Investigating how other projects solve a similar problem
- Checking if a pattern used in the codebase has known issues
- Any time you need external information before making a decision
Don't use when: you need to act on findings immediately (use /marshal which calls /research internally).
Modes
Single (default): one agent, 2-4 queries, 3-6 sources. Steps 1-5 below.
Parallel (/research --parallel): scout agents investigate independent
angles of the same question using Fleet wave mechanics. See Parallel Mode
below. Without the flag, prefer parallel mode (and say so in the plan) when
the question naturally decomposes into 3+ independent angles: evaluating
multiple competing technologies or approaches, distinct sub-questions that
don't depend on each other, or time-sensitive research where parallel
execution matters.
If the question is narrow and focused, stay single-agent. Don't parallelize what a single agent can answer in 5 minutes.
Protocol (Single Mode)
Step 1: FORMULATE
Convert the research question into 2-4 specific search queries:
- Official docs query (e.g., "express.js middleware error handling docs")
- Community/GitHub query (e.g., "express error middleware best practices site:github.com")
- Technical blog/comparison query (e.g., "express vs fastify error handling 2025")
- Release notes query if version-specific (e.g., "express 5.x changelog breaking changes")
State the question clearly in one sentence before searching.
Step 2: SEARCH
Execute searches and read actual content (not just snippets):
- Use WebSearch for discovery, WebFetch for reading actual pages
- Evaluate source credibility: official docs > GitHub repos with stars > recent blog posts > forum answers
- Stop at 3-6 credible sources (not exhaustive — focused)
- If a source contradicts another, note the disagreement
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.
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 322 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A 575967a77ddc
research is a skill published in the GitHub repository SethGammon/Citadel (925 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 3,057 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
compose-org
Run a task as an evolved multi-agent ORG using the installed liquid-org framework — where YOU (the running Claude) embody the org: you ask liquid-org which proven team topology + specialist personas to use (retrieved from its evolved pool, or assembled fresh), then dispatch ONE SUBAGENT PER TALENT to play each role…
liquid-rank
Rank the available skills by RELEVANCE to the current task, on demand, using liquid-org's read-only hermes skill ranker. This is an EXPLICIT, OPT-IN selector you invoke WHEN you want help choosing the most relevant skill for what you're doing — it is NOT default, automatic skill selection, and it does NOT decide for…
present-gate
First-officer gate-presentation rendering — the captain-facing gate-review template and assembly rules, including workflow-owned finding labels. Invoke at the gate point after the FO has decided a stage must be presented.
audit-project
Run an iterative multi-agent code audit until critical and high findings are resolved. Use when the user says "audit my code", "find all the bugs", "deep code audit", "iterative review", or "review until clean".
prototype
Use when asked to prototype one design question through a cheap logic or UI experiment, including button-driven state-model checks. Not for polished artifacts: use polished-web-prototype.
contexts
Use when the user says "get context on X", "how does X work", or wants architectural orientation before coding.