Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to statecrafting/spec-spine. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/statecrafting/spec-spine/main/.claude/skills/research/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/statecrafting/spec-spineWrote 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/statecrafting/spec-spine/research)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/statecrafting/spec-spine/research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/statecrafting/spec-spine/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/statecrafting/spec-spine/research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/statecrafting/spec-spine/research.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 | $0.00033 | $0.00947 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00016 | $0.00474 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00007 | $0.00189 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00003 | $0.00095 |
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 yesterday.
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 — 99 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Research
Conduct deep, parallel research on a topic using specialized sub-agents. Agents cost tokens: classify first, spawn the fewest that answer the question, and pass reports through files rather than inline.
Research query
$ARGUMENTS
Phase 1: classify
| Type | Characteristics | Sub-agents | Depth each |
|---|---|---|---|
| Breadth-first | several independent aspects, surveys, comparisons | 3 to 6 | 5 to 10 searches |
| Depth-first | one topic needing thorough understanding | 2 to 3 | 10 to 15 searches |
| Simple factual | one fact, one lookup | 1 | 3 to 5 searches |
Decide: query type, agent count, domains (corpus, codebase, external docs, papers, general web), and scope (corpus-only, web-only, hybrid).
- Corpus questions ("what does spec 020 say about erasure", "who owns
this file", "what depends on 064", "how does the compiler validate
frontmatter"): use the
exploreragent withspec-spine registry show|relationships <id>,spec-spine index render,spec-spine index coverage,Grepoverspecs/and the source, andgit log. Never parse.derived/directly. - External questions (a protocol, a library's semantics, an RFC):
WebSearchandWebFetch, preferring primary sources (specifications, RFCs, the library's own docs). - Many questions are hybrid; split them across agents by domain.
Phase 2: parallel execution
Spawn all sub-agents in one message. Each prompt begins with a depth trigger: "Quick check:", "Investigate:", or "Deep dive:".
Each sub-agent MUST write its full report to the session scratchpad
directory when one is listed in the system prompt (otherwise a
research/ directory under the tool-state root spec-spine.toml [layout] state_dir names, never committed) as
research_<timestamp>_<slug>.md and return only: the file path, a two to
three sentence summary, key topics, and the source count.
Example, hybrid ("how should the new spec bind an identity key to the transport certificate?"):
Task 1: "Deep dive: raw public key TLS (RFC 7250) support in the libraries this stack uses"
Task 2: "Investigate: what the existing specs already fix about identity binding; use spec-spine registry show and relationships"
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.
- yesterday First seen · 99 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A 6a5c3d232531
research is a skill published in the GitHub repository statecrafting/spec-spine (10 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 947 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-09-07.
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