research

research is a skill for Claude Code from tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent. It costs 98 tokens per session (1,681 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research workflow that investigates a topic and creates a new note in a personal knowledge vault. It breaks broad questions into smaller questions covering definitions, importance, methods, tradeoffs, and developments.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to learn about a topic, investigate a question, explore an idea, or create a research note from a planned set of sub-questions.
Why use it?
It turns an unfamiliar subject into a structured investigation and stores the result for later use. It also distinguishes broad research from finding papers or processing an existing note.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the obsidian-vault-agent plugin — 13 skills, 16 agents, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to learn about a topic, investigate a question, explore an idea, or create a research note from a planned set of sub-questions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/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 tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent --skill research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install obsidian-vault-agent, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills, 16 agents, 3 hooks.

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/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/research/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/research/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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 98 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,681 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 $0.00098 $0.01681
Opus 5 $0.00049 $0.00840
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00336
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00168

Measured 10d ago against content hash 24aa2d801b23, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, 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 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.

skills/research/SKILL.md · 208 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 208 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

<Use_When>

  • User asks to research a topic ("research quantum error correction")
  • User wants to understand something new ("what is RLHF and why does it matter?")
  • User wants a research note created in the vault
  • User uses /research with a topic </Use_When>

<Do_Not_Use_When>

  • User wants to find academic papers specifically (use /paper-discover)
  • User wants to process an existing vault note (use /process)
  • User wants to synthesize across existing vault notes (use /synthesize)
  • User has a YouTube video to process (use /youtube) </Do_Not_Use_When>

Stage 1: PLAN — Decompose the Question

Parse the topic from $ARGUMENTS. If vague, ask one clarifying question.

Break the research topic into 3-5 specific sub-questions that together cover the topic well. Think about:

  • What IS it? (definition, core mechanism)
  • Why does it matter? (motivation, impact, who cares)
  • How does it work? (process, architecture, method)
  • What are the tradeoffs? (limitations, alternatives, open problems)
  • Where is it going? (trends, recent developments, future)

Present the sub-questions to the user briefly:

Researching "topic". Sub-questions:
1. ...
2. ...
3. ...
Searching now.

Don't wait for confirmation unless the topic is ambiguous — just show and go.

Stage 2: SEARCH VAULT — What Do We Already Know?

Before hitting the web, check what the vault already contains:

Grep(pattern="KEYWORD", path="notes/", glob="*.md", head_limit=15)

Also try MCP search if available:

mcp__obsidian-vault__search_notes(query="KEYWORD", limit=10)

Note any existing vault notes that are relevant — these become [[wikilinks]] in the output and inform what the web search should FOCUS on (gaps, not repeats).

Read the full file on GitHub · 208 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. 10d ago First seen · 208 lines · 98 tokens per session scan A 24aa2d801b23

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a skill published in the GitHub repository tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent (39 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 98 tokens to every session and 1,681 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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