research

A research workflow for studying an external code repository and recording its architecture, data structures, and important algorithms in Markdown memos.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to vendor repositories as Git submodules, answer focused technical questions, and create or update research documentation under the project's research folder.
Why use it?
It preserves technical findings so later design and implementation work can rely on them instead of repeating the investigation.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tyrchen/rust-lib-template/research
Any agent
npx skills add tyrchen/rust-lib-template --skill research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tyrchen/rust-lib-template

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 139 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,935 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00139 $0.02935
Opus 5 $0.00069 $0.01468
Sonnet 5 $0.00028 $0.00587
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00294

Measured 2d ago against content hash 1dac4873ed52, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 2d 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.

.agents/skills/research/SKILL.md · 212 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 212 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research

Capture prior art with rigour: vendor the upstream code, read it deeply, write a memo that future you (and the spec / impl skills) can rely on. Memos are load-bearing; they pin assumptions before code is written so spec drift and rework do not happen later.

When this fires

  • "do deep research on <repo>" / "study how <repo> works"
  • "submodule <urls> to ./vendors" / "vendor <repo> for reference"
  • "before we design X, look into how <crate> does it"
  • "spike on <assumption>" — a single-question, time-boxed memo
  • The user pastes GitHub URLs and asks Codex to learn from them
  • The spec or impl skill needs prior-art before proceeding and there is no memo yet

If ./docs/research/ already contains a relevant memo, read it first and decide whether to update it instead of writing a new one. Do not duplicate.

What to produce

For each topic, exactly one memo at ./docs/research/<kind>-<slug>.md plus an updated ./docs/index.md (or wherever the project's AGENTS.md says research lives). Three memo kinds, picked by intent:

  • spike-<slug>.md — a single, sharp, time-boxed question ("does ArcSwap<Arc<dyn T>> compose?", "is linkme reliable on macOS arm64 release+LTO?"). Validates one assumption with a runnable artefact. ≤ 2 pages.
  • study-<slug>.md — a deep-dive into one or more vendored repos ("how tokio-rs/tracing resolves dispatcher per call site", "how defmt interns log strings", "comparing how prost / quick-protobuf / buffa handle unknown fields"). 3–10 pages, cites file paths and line numbers.
  • survey-<slug>.md — pure web / docs research where vendoring is not warranted ("latest axum middleware patterns", "current state of Rust async cancellation"). Cite the latest stable version of each source, link to upstream docs / blog posts / RFCs, and note the date — surveys go stale faster than spikes or studies.

Always pick the narrowest kind that fits; specificity beats breadth.

Diagram expectation

Read the full file on GitHub · 212 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. 2d ago First seen · 212 lines · 139 tokens per session scan A 1dac4873ed52

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a skill published in the GitHub repository tyrchen/rust-lib-template (51 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 139 tokens to every session and 2,935 once invoked, about $0.0007 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

brainstorming

You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.

obra/superpowers · 37 tokens

auto-perf-optimize

Run agent-driven VS Code performance or memory investigations. Use when asked to launch Code OSS, automate a VS Code scenario, run the Chat memory smoke runner, capture renderer heap snapshots, take workflow screenshots, compare run summaries, or drive a repeatable scenario before heap-snapshot analysis.

microsoft/vscode · 62 tokens

chat-perf

Run chat perf benchmarks and memory leak checks against the local dev build or any published VS Code version. Use when investigating chat rendering regressions, validating perf-sensitive changes to chat UI, or checking for memory leaks in the chat response pipeline.

microsoft/vscode · 51 tokens

chat-pet-sprite-creation

Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.

microsoft/vscode · 53 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens