people-research

people-research is a skill for Claude Code from tomopay/exa-mcp-server. It costs 46 tokens per session (804 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of people-research, MIT.

A people-search skill that uses Exa, a web search service, to find public professional profiles, biographies, experts, and team members.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find people, research professional backgrounds, identify experts, or look up team members and public bios.
Why use it?
It reduces the time spent searching across LinkedIn and other websites, while its instructions keep searches out of the main coding-agent conversation.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: context: fork in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it to find people, research professional backgrounds, identify experts, or look up team members and public bios.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tomopay/exa-mcp-server/people-search
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 tomopay/exa-mcp-server --skill people-search
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tomopay/exa-mcp-server

Made for: Claude Code.

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 people-research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tomopay/exa-mcp-server/people-search/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tomopay/exa-mcp-server/people-search)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tomopay/exa-mcp-server/people-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tomopay/exa-mcp-server/people-search/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 people-research

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tomopay/exa-mcp-server/people-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tomopay/exa-mcp-server/people-search.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 46 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 804 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 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00046 $0.00804
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00402
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00161
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00080

Measured 10d ago against content hash 4f99062a15df, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

people-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 10d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to people-research — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/people-search/SKILL.md · 117 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 117 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

People Research

Tool Restriction (Critical)

ONLY use web_search_advanced_exa. Do NOT use web_search_exa or any other Exa tools.

Token Isolation (Critical)

Never run Exa searches in main context. Always spawn Task agents:

  • Agent runs Exa search internally
  • Agent processes results using LLM intelligence
  • Agent returns only distilled output (compact JSON or brief markdown)
  • Main context stays clean regardless of search volume

Dynamic Tuning

No hardcoded numResults. Tune to user intent:

  • User says "a few" → 10-20
  • User says "comprehensive" → 50-100
  • User specifies number → match it
  • Ambiguous? Ask: "How many profiles would you like?"

Query Variation

Exa returns different results for different phrasings. For coverage:

  • Generate 2-3 query variations
  • Run in parallel
  • Merge and deduplicate

Categories

Use appropriate Exa category depending on what you need:

  • people → LinkedIn profiles, public bios (primary for discovery)
  • personal site → personal blogs, portfolio sites, about pages
  • news → press mentions, interviews, speaker bios
  • No category (type: "auto") → general web results, broader context

Start with category: "people" for profile discovery, then use other categories or no category for deeper research on specific individuals.

Category-Specific Filter Restrictions

When using category: "people", these parameters cause errors:

  • startPublishedDate / endPublishedDate
  • startCrawlDate / endCrawlDate
  • includeText / excludeText
  • excludeDomains
  • includeDomainsLinkedIn domains only (e.g., "linkedin.com")

When searching without a category, all parameters are available (but includeText/excludeText still only support single-item arrays).

LinkedIn

Public LinkedIn via Exa: category: "people", no other filters. Auth-required LinkedIn → use Claude in Chrome browser fallback.

Browser Fallback

Auto-fallback to Claude in Chrome when:

  • Exa returns insufficient results
  • Content is auth-gated
  • Dynamic pages need JavaScript

Read the full file on GitHub · 117 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. 10d ago First seen · 117 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A 4f99062a15df

Subscribe to this mod's changes

people-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository tomopay/exa-mcp-server (0 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 804 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to people-research, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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