research

research is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from theagenticguy/erpaval. It costs 82 tokens per session (738 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A multi-agent workflow for investigating a question. It divides the research into several focused tasks, records each agent's findings in files, and combines them into one final brief.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for research, comparisons, investigations, or learning about a topic. It produces separate workstreams and a synthesized result based on their findings.
Why use it?
It keeps a large investigation organized and makes intermediate findings visible. Splitting the work helps cover separate parts of a question before drawing conclusions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the erpaval plugin — 11 skills, 1 agent, 3 hooks, 5 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/theagenticguy/erpaval/research
Any agent
npx skills add theagenticguy/erpaval --skill research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/theagenticguy/erpaval

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install erpaval, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 1 agent, 3 hooks, 5 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/theagenticguy/erpaval/research.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/theagenticguy/erpaval/research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/theagenticguy/erpaval/research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/theagenticguy/erpaval/research.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 82 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 738 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 $0.00082 $0.00738
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.00369
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00148
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00074

Measured 3d ago against content hash 17fd1d911596, 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 3d 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 · 54 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 54 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Contents

Reference When to load
references/orchestrator.md Running /research <topic> — the full 5-phase flow
references/write-protocol.md Copy verbatim into every agent prompt
references/search-strategies.md Tool inventory, priority order, query patterns
templates/agent-skeleton.md Per-agent Markdown file skeleton
templates/synthesis-skeleton.md Synthesis output skeleton

Research

A single-mode research orchestrator. Runs inside a forked subagent so the main conversation stays clean. Decomposes the question, launches 2–4 Opus 4.7 agents in parallel with a file-first write protocol, monitors progress by reading their files, recovers stuck agents, and then runs one synthesis pass to produce the final brief.

How it works

Read references/orchestrator.md and follow its phases. The short version:

  1. Plan — decompose into 2–4 workstreams with non-overlapping scopes and 3–6 sections each. Present plan. Wait for approval.
  2. Skeletons — create research/{slug}/ and write a file per agent plus a synthesis file, each starting with Status: IN PROGRESS.
  3. Launch — fire all research agents in one message as parallel Agent calls with model: "opus" and run_in_background: true.
  4. Monitor — escalating check-ins (30s → 2m → 5m). wc -l per file to track progress. If an agent's line count stalls across two checks, launch a fresh Agent with the existing file state and a "skip these sections" prompt.
  5. Synthesize — one foreground Agent reads every agent file and writes synthesis.md with themed findings, contradictions, confidence, gaps, next steps, and deduplicated sources.

Write discipline

Every agent prompt carries the write protocol verbatim from references/write-protocol.md: one search or fetch → edit the file with findings → next search. This keeps partial progress on disk where it survives timeouts and 403 errors.

Read the full file on GitHub · 54 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 3d ago First seen · 54 lines · 82 tokens per session scan A 17fd1d911596

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a skill published in the GitHub repository theagenticguy/erpaval (27 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 82 tokens to every session and 738 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.