Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to TenureAI/PhD-Zero. 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/TenureAI/PhD-Zero/main/.agents/skills/deep-research/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TenureAI/PhD-ZeroWrote 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/tenureai/phd-zero/deep-research)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tenureai/phd-zero/deep-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tenureai/phd-zero/deep-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/tenureai/phd-zero/deep-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tenureai/phd-zero/deep-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 | $0.00198 | $0.03272 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00079 | $0.01309 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00040 | $0.00654 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00020 | $0.00327 |
Grade A, and why
deep-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 — 334 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Deep Research
Mission
Produce a deeply researched, evidence-grounded answer with clear provenance and actionable conclusions, and act as the default gateway for external search in research runs.
Search Routing Gate (Mandatory)
All external search during non-trivial research runs must enter through deep-research.
Rules:
- do not bypass
deep-researchwith ad hoc direct search when fresh outside evidence is needed deep-researchmay choose a lighter or deeper execution depth internally, but it may not silently skip actual search- every
deep-researchrun must perform real WebSearch calls and keep an auditable query trail - if search is skipped because existing evidence is already fresh enough, emit
dr_skip_reasonwith explicit date windows and source counts
Research Type Selection
Choose a primary research_type early:
idea-explorationdebug-investigationdesign-decisionimplementation-strategyconflict-resolution
If templates do not fit exactly, adapt structure freely but keep depth, verification, and citations.
Intake Checkpoint Gate (Mandatory Before Search)
Before selecting depth or running any WebSearch queries:
- confirm
intake_checkpoint_complete=YES - intake must at least define: objective/scope, constraints, and expected deliverable format
- route missing-information requests through
human-checkpoint - in
moderateordetailed, prefer built-in user-question tool (request_user_input) - if built-in tool is unavailable, degrade to concise plain-text questions
- if intake is incomplete, remain in clarification phase and do not run search, decomposition, or synthesis
Frontier-First Scout (Mandatory)
Every deep-research run must begin with a frontier-first scout before final depth selection.
Scout requirements:
- run at least 6-10 queries total
- cover at least:
bleeding-edgetopic queriesfrontiertopic queries- one verification query family
- one counter-evidence or criticism query family
- capture representative freshness, source quality, and contradiction density
- use scout evidence to choose final depth
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 · 334 lines · 198 tokens per session scan A e206e03b6170
deep-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository TenureAI/PhD-Zero (53 stars, last pushed 7mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 198 tokens to every session and 3,272 once invoked, about $0.0008 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.
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