research-plan

research-plan is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from TenureAI/PhD-Zero. It costs 93 tokens per session (2,020 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured plan for turning a research idea into specific experiments, implementation tasks, and evaluation steps. It can include ablation designs, which compare versions with one component removed or changed.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create research proposals, experiment plans, ablation studies, evaluation roadmaps, and the code, data, and workload requirements behind them.
Why use it?
It turns an early idea into work that a developer or researcher can actually run, while making prerequisites, expected results, and risks explicit.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/tenureai/phd-zero/research-plan
Any agent
npx skills add TenureAI/PhD-Zero --skill research-plan
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TenureAI/PhD-Zero

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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-plan

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tenureai/phd-zero/research-plan.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tenureai/phd-zero/research-plan)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tenureai/phd-zero/research-plan"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tenureai/phd-zero/research-plan.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,020 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 5.1 $0.00093 $0.02020
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.01010
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00404
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00202

Measured 6d ago against content hash e886c6145abb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research-plan 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 6d 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.

.agents/skills/research-plan/SKILL.md · 283 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 283 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research Plan

Mission

Turn an early-stage research idea into a concrete, execution-ready plan with clear experiments, implementation prerequisites, and expected results.

Interaction Policy

Once the user has chosen a direction, stop asking frequent clarification questions unless a missing detail would materially change the plan.

Default behavior after direction is fixed:

  1. Infer reasonable assumptions.
  2. Write the full detailed plan in one pass.
  3. Ask follow-up questions only for hard blockers or high-risk ambiguity.

Do not turn normal planning into a back-and-forth questionnaire.

Delivery Policy

Separate the full planning artifact from the chat summary.

  1. The full plan should still be detailed and complete.
  2. In the CLI chat, do not dump the entire long report unless the user explicitly asks for it.
  3. In the CLI chat, provide a concise summary focused on:
    • key innovation points
    • experiment plan
    • code base and file requirements
    • data or workload requirements
    • expected results
    • major risks
  4. Keep progress updates short while drafting.

When To Use

Use this skill when the user asks for any of the following:

  1. A research plan or proposal.
  2. A project plan before implementation.
  3. A paper idea breakdown into experiments.
  4. An ablation or evaluation roadmap.
  5. A study design for a general CS research project.

Non-Negotiable Output Sections

Every final plan must include all sections below. Do not omit a section just because the user did not mention it.

  1. Problem Definition
    • What problem is being solved?
    • Why does it matter?
    • What exact question will the study answer?
  2. Research Focus
    • State the core research points.
    • Separate primary question, secondary questions, and boundary conditions.
  3. Innovation Points
    • List specific novelty claims.
    • Compare against likely baselines or common approaches.
    • Distinguish true novelty from engineering cleanup.
  4. Experiment Plan
    • Enumerate the exact experiments to run.
    • Include baseline, main experiment, ablation, robustness, and error-analysis experiments when relevant.
    • For each experiment: hypothesis, setup, variables, metrics, and success signal.
  5. How To Do It
    • Code Base: what kind of repository or framework is needed.
    • Related Files: configs, manifests, experiment scripts, evaluation scripts, request templates when needed, documentation, metadata, report templates, and logs.
    • Data / Workloads / Inputs: required datasets, workloads, traces, corpora, benchmarks, or input sources; plus split policy, access constraints, and preprocessing if needed.
  6. Expected Results
    • What outcomes are expected qualitatively and quantitatively.
    • What negative or null outcomes are still informative.
  7. Risk And Fallback
    • Technical risks, data risks, evaluation risks, and fallback routes.
  8. Deliverables
    • What artifacts should exist at the end.

Read the full file on GitHub · 283 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 6d ago First seen · 283 lines · 93 tokens per session scan A e886c6145abb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research-plan is a skill published in the GitHub repository TenureAI/PhD-Zero (52 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 2,020 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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