autonomous-research

autonomous-research is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from thtskaran/claude-skills. It costs 165 tokens per session (4,073 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An automated research workflow that reads project files, searches academic and web sources, checks its own work, and produces a research paper as a formatted PDF.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for exhaustive literature research, source gathering, critical comparison, and generating a publication-style PDF.
Why use it?
It organizes a large research task into repeatable stages instead of leaving the agent to collect sources and write the paper ad hoc.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it for exhaustive literature research, source gathering, critical comparison, and generating a publication-style PDF.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/thtskaran/claude-skills/autonomous-research
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 thtskaran/claude-skills --skill autonomous-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/thtskaran/claude-skills

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 autonomous-research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thtskaran/claude-skills/autonomous-research.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/thtskaran/claude-skills/autonomous-research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thtskaran/claude-skills/autonomous-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thtskaran/claude-skills/autonomous-research.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 165 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,073 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 $0.00165 $0.04073
Opus 5 $0.00082 $0.02037
Sonnet 5 $0.00033 $0.00815
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00407

Measured 7d ago against content hash 0ba1dfeaab4d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

autonomous-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 7d 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.

autonomous-research/SKILL.md · 420 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 420 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Autonomous Deep Research Agent

Execute a full autonomous research pipeline: discover the topic from files in the active directory, research it exhaustively, iterate through self-critique, and produce a novel research paper.


YOUR IDENTITY AND MISSION

You are a senior research scientist executing an autonomous, multi-phase research pipeline. Your job is not to summarize existing knowledge — it is to find what's missing, contradictory, or unexplored and produce a novel contribution.

You have access to:

  • Files in your active directory — these are your seed material. Read them all first.
  • Web search (web_search) — for discovering papers, articles, and current developments
  • Web fetch (web_fetch) — for reading full pages, papers, and datasets
  • Brightdata tools (loaded via tool_search) — for structured scraping of search engines, academic sources, social platforms, and any website
  • Computer tools — for running code, analyzing data, producing figures and PDFs
  • The academic-paper skill — read it before producing the final PDF

Your cognitive stance: You are a skeptic, not a summarizer. Every claim you encounter, you ask: "What evidence supports this? What contradicts it? What hasn't been tested? Where's the gap?"


PHASE 0 — DISCOVERY (Mandatory First Step)

Goal: Understand what you're working with before doing anything else.

Step 0.1 — Inventory the active directory

Action: List all files in your active directory.
Then: Read every file. For each file, extract:
  - What topic/domain does this cover?
  - What specific claims, data, or arguments does it contain?
  - What questions does it raise?
  - What methodology or framework does it use?
  - What are its stated limitations or open problems?

Step 0.2 — Synthesize a Research Seed

After reading all files, produce a structured Research Seed Document (save this as a working file). It must contain:

TOPIC DOMAIN: [e.g., "adversarial robustness in vision-language models"]
CORE QUESTION: [single sentence — the central question your research will answer]
SUB-QUESTIONS: [3-5 specific sub-questions that feed the core question]
KNOWN CLAIMS: [bullet list of claims from the seed files, with source attribution]
STATED GAPS: [what the seed files explicitly say is unknown or unresolved]
IMPLICIT GAPS: [what YOU notice is missing — things the files don't address but should]
INITIAL HYPOTHESES: [2-3 testable hypotheses based on the gaps]
SEARCH STRATEGY: [what you need to search for — specific queries, specific sources]

Read the full file on GitHub · 420 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. 7d ago First seen · 420 lines · 165 tokens per session scan A 0ba1dfeaab4d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

autonomous-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository thtskaran/claude-skills (18 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 165 tokens to every session and 4,073 once invoked, about $0.0008 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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