research

research is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from SethGammon/Citadel. It costs 67 tokens per session (3,057 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A focused research workflow for answering technical questions with structured findings, confidence levels, and source citations.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to compare technologies, check dependencies, read official documentation, investigate engineering practices, or examine known issues.
Why use it?
It organizes investigation and makes uncertainty and supporting evidence visible.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the citadel plugin — 48 skills, 7 agents, 2 MCP servers shipped together

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/sethgammon/citadel/research
Any agent
npx skills add SethGammon/Citadel --skill research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/SethGammon/Citadel

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install citadel, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 48 skills, 7 agents, 2 MCP servers.

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 research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sethgammon/citadel/research.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethgammon/citadel/research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethgammon/citadel/research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sethgammon/citadel/research.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 67 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,057 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 $0.00067 $0.03057
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.01528
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00611
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00306

Measured 4d ago against content hash 575967a77ddc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

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 4d 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/research/SKILL.md · 322 lines

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

Read the full file on GitHub · 322 lines

Files

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.

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. 4d ago First seen · 322 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A 575967a77ddc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a skill published in the GitHub repository SethGammon/Citadel (916 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 3,057 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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