PhD-Zero: Skill for Codex

.agents/skills/research-workflow/SKILL.md

research-workflow is a skill for Codex from TenureAI/PhD-Zero. It costs 127 tokens per session (4,362 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A coordinator for non-trivial artificial-intelligence research and development work. It organizes context, research, experiments, memory, checkpoints, and paper writing into evidence-based stages.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to set run policy, gather project context, clarify requirements, retrieve prior knowledge, plan research, run experiments, and prepare reports or papers.
Why use it?
It prevents complex research tasks from becoming an untracked sequence of guesses, experiments, and undocumented decisions.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents); mentions Codex.

This is TenureAI/PhD-Zero's own configuration. It tells Codex how to work on PhD-Zero itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything PhD-Zero configures →

Reuse

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.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TenureAI/PhD-Zero/main/.agents/skills/research-workflow/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TenureAI/PhD-Zero

Made for: 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-workflow

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tenureai/phd-zero/research-workflow/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tenureai/phd-zero/research-workflow)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tenureai/phd-zero/research-workflow"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tenureai/phd-zero/research-workflow/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for research-workflow

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tenureai/phd-zero/research-workflow"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tenureai/phd-zero/research-workflow.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 127 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,362 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 $0.00127 $0.04362
Opus 5.5 $0.00051 $0.01745
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00025 $0.00872
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00436

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 0875ab40cd31, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research-workflow 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.

.agents/skills/research-workflow/SKILL.md · 392 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 392 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research Workflow

Mission

Drive AI R&D tasks with small, testable, evidence-first steps while supporting durable long-running execution, aggressive experience retrieval, and DR-first external search.

Orchestration Order

CRITICAL: Each step below that names a skill MUST be executed by calling Skill(skill: "<name>"). Do NOT simulate or skip the skill — actually invoke it via the Skill tool. Producing output that a skill should produce without invoking that skill is a workflow violation.

For non-trivial tasks, run this order:

  1. Skill(skill: "run-governor") — Initialize run policy (mode + run_id) and reconcile active long actions before any execution.
  2. Skill(skill: "project-context") — Resolve runtime context before experiment/report/eval execution. MUST call when env setup is needed.
  3. Understand user objective and current code/evidence state.
  4. Skill(skill: "human-checkpoint") — Clarify ambiguous requirements. MUST call when intake is incomplete.
  5. Complete intake checkpoint before planning or decomposition.
  6. Skill(skill: "memory-manager") — Run bootstrap retrieval and initialize durable working state. MUST call before planning.
  7. Skill(skill: "deep-research") — Use as the default external search gateway whenever outside evidence is needed, and always when research-intent keywords appear.
  8. Skill(skill: "research-plan") — Build execution plan. MUST call for planning-heavy requests or after deep-research scoping.
  9. Confirm plan as required by mode.
  10. Skill(skill: "experiment-execution") — Execute experiment. MUST call for any actual run/launch/monitor.
  11. Replan on major issues when needed.
  12. Emit stage reports and maintain report index.
  13. Skill(skill: "memory-manager") — Close-out writeback. MUST call before task completion.
  14. Skill(skill: "paper-writing") — Write paper deliverable. MUST call only when user explicitly asks for paper output.

Mode-Aware Interaction Policy

Read the full file on GitHub · 392 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 1mo ago First seen · 392 lines · 127 tokens per session scan A 0875ab40cd31

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research-workflow is a skill published in the GitHub repository TenureAI/PhD-Zero (53 stars, last pushed 7mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 127 tokens to every session and 4,362 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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