research-brief

research-brief is a skill for Claude Code from TheCraigHewitt/cowork-starter-pack. It costs 79 tokens per session (1,210 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research workflow that creates a one-page brief about a topic, person, company, competitor, or other subject using current sources.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps explain the basics, identify recent changes, review project context, and show sources and uncertainty.
Why use it?
It gathers scattered background information so you can understand a subject before a meeting or decision.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the cowork-starter-pack plugin — 7 skills shipped together

Good fit It helps explain the basics, identify recent changes, review project context, and show sources and uncertainty.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/thecraighewitt/cowork-starter-pack/research-brief
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.

Any agent
npx skills add TheCraigHewitt/cowork-starter-pack --skill research-brief
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TheCraigHewitt/cowork-starter-pack

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cowork-starter-pack, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills.

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-brief

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thecraighewitt/cowork-starter-pack/research-brief/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/thecraighewitt/cowork-starter-pack/research-brief)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thecraighewitt/cowork-starter-pack/research-brief"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thecraighewitt/cowork-starter-pack/research-brief/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-brief

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thecraighewitt/cowork-starter-pack/research-brief"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thecraighewitt/cowork-starter-pack/research-brief.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 79 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,210 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 $0.00079 $0.01210
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00605
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00242
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00121

Measured 11d ago against content hash 0c14b5faf148, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research-brief 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 11d 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-brief/SKILL.md · 84 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 84 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research Brief

Turn "I need to know about X before my 2pm call" into a one-page brief the user can skim in three minutes and feel prepared.

Before starting

  1. Ask the user what they want a brief on if it's not clear. A company? A person? A topic? A competitor?
  2. Ask what they need the brief for. A sales call? A strategic decision? A blog post? Same subject, different briefs.
  3. Read context/preferences.md — source citation style, confidence level tagging if relevant
  4. Check the project folder — have you researched this subject before? Build on it, don't redo it.

What to produce

A markdown file saved to /output/research-brief-{subject}-{YYYY-MM-DD}.md with four sections:

  1. The 30-second version — three to five sentences. If the user only reads this section, what do they need to know?
  2. What they do / what it is — core facts. Company: product, size, customers, how they make money. Person: role, background, what they're known for. Topic: the basics.
  3. What matters right now — recent news, strategic shifts, public statements, anything timely. What's changed in the last 90 days.
  4. Sources & confidence — what you drew from, and where you're guessing vs. citing. Label each claim with a confidence marker if the user asked for it in preferences.md.

Inputs

  • Web search (required)
  • The user's prior research on this subject in the project folder (if exists)
  • Recent emails mentioning the subject (optional — useful for competitive briefs)
  • Any docs the user uploaded with the request

How it works

  1. Understand the subject and the purpose (ask if unclear)
  2. Search the web — company site, news, LinkedIn if it's a person, press releases, recent podcast/video appearances for public figures
  3. Cross-reference with any existing project context
  4. Draft the four sections. Short. Dense with information. No padding.
  5. Flag anything uncertain or contested — never smooth over ambiguity
  6. Save the file, tell the user one-line what stood out ("Strong product, weak financials — the gap is interesting if you're pitching to them")

Read the full file on GitHub · 84 lines

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. 11d ago First seen · 84 lines · 79 tokens per session scan A 0c14b5faf148

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research-brief is a skill published in the GitHub repository TheCraigHewitt/cowork-starter-pack (5 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 79 tokens to every session and 1,210 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 2026-08-31.

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