research

research is a skill for Codex from tsai09495/matt-pocock-engineering. It costs 33 tokens per session (577 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A focused engineering research workflow based mainly on source code, official documentation, specifications, and APIs. It produces findings that can be checked against those sources.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate a bounded engineering question, support a technical decision, or create a cited Markdown report.
Why use it?
It prevents broad or unsupported investigation when a team needs an answer to one specific technical question.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present.

Good fit Use it to investigate a bounded engineering question, support a technical decision, or create a cited Markdown report.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tsai09495/matt-pocock-engineering/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 tsai09495/matt-pocock-engineering --skill research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tsai09495/matt-pocock-engineering

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

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tsai09495/matt-pocock-engineering/research.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tsai09495/matt-pocock-engineering/research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tsai09495/matt-pocock-engineering/research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tsai09495/matt-pocock-engineering/research.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 33 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 577 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 $0.00033 $0.00577
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00289
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00115
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00058

Measured 8d ago against content hash 60becdd12e23, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, 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 8d 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.

plugins/matt-engineering/skills/research/SKILL.md · 71 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 71 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research

Answer one bounded engineering question with auditable evidence. Default to the current agent. Background or parallel research is available only through optional-enhancements.md.

Scope

Before searching, state or infer:

  • the exact question;
  • what decision the answer will support;
  • source and freshness requirements;
  • what is explicitly outside scope.

Ask only when an ambiguity would materially change the research. Do not turn a narrow lookup into a broad market or architecture study.

Evidence hierarchy

Prefer, in order appropriate to the question:

  1. repository source code, tests, schemas, and pinned dependency versions;
  2. official documentation, specifications, standards, and first-party API references;
  3. upstream source code, release notes, issues, or maintainer statements;
  4. high-quality secondary analysis only when primary sources do not answer the question.

For mutable facts, verify against current sources. For technical questions, do not treat search snippets, generated summaries, or unsourced community claims as proof.

Method

  1. Inspect local repository evidence first when the question concerns the current codebase.
  2. Gather the smallest set of sources that can answer the question.
  3. Cross-check important claims that depend on interpretation or version differences.
  4. Record contradictions, version boundaries, and access limitations.
  5. Separate:
    • Confirmed fact — directly supported by cited evidence;
    • Inference — a reasoned conclusion from facts, labelled as such;
    • Unknown — evidence is missing, contradictory, or inaccessible.
  6. Answer the decision question, not merely summarize sources.

Output

If the user wants only a chat answer, respond in chat and do not create a file. If the user requests durable research, or an authorized parent workflow needs an artifact, use the repository's existing research/docs convention. When no convention exists, propose a location before the first write.

Read the full file on GitHub · 71 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. 8d ago First seen · 71 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A 60becdd12e23

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a skill published in the GitHub repository tsai09495/matt-pocock-engineering (2 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 577 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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