research-brief-creator

research-brief-creator is a skill for Claude Code from ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills. It costs 45 tokens per session (2,121 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A reporting plan for a new story assignment, covering questions to answer, sources to contact, documents to seek, and possible angles.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to prepare investigations, background reporting, story pitches, and research assignments.
Why use it?
It gives reporters a clear starting point when a topic is unfamiliar or an assignment is still vague. It also makes a reporting approach easier to hand to an editor or colleague.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the autopunk-media-skills plugin — 187 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to prepare investigations, background reporting, story pitches, and research assignments.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/research-brief-creator
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 ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills --skill research-brief-creator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install autopunk-media-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 187 skills.

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-brief-creator

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/research-brief-creator/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/research-brief-creator)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/research-brief-creator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/research-brief-creator/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-brief-creator

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/research-brief-creator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/research-brief-creator.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 45 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,121 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00045 $0.02121
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.01060
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00424
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00212

Measured 8d ago against content hash da2b3ff05b3a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research-brief-creator 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.

skills/magazine-journalism/ideation/research-brief-creator/SKILL.md · 131 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 131 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research Brief Creator

What This Skill Does

Produces a structured research brief for a reporter starting a new story assignment — covering the key questions to answer, the types of sources to seek, documents to obtain, and potential story angles to investigate.

When To Use This Skill

  • An editor has assigned you a story and you need to organize your reporting approach before you start making calls
  • You're researching an unfamiliar topic and want a structured entry point before diving into background reading
  • You're handing an assignment to a researcher or junior reporter and want to give them a clear brief rather than a vague direction
  • You're pitching a story and want to show an editor you've thought through the reporting methodology

What You Need To Provide

Required: The story topic or assignment in one or two sentences; the publication type (news, magazine feature, investigative, business press, general interest); any known constraints (time available for reporting, word count, known deadline pressure). Optional: What you already know about the topic; any obvious angles the editor mentioned; similar stories you've read on the topic (to understand what's been covered); geographic or demographic focus; any specific sources you've already identified.

How the Assistant Approaches This

  1. Maps the story territory: what is established (the background a reporter should understand), what is contested (the questions still being debated by sources and institutions), and what is unknown (the gaps that could make this story original).
  2. Generates three distinct potential story angles — each with a different primary question, target source set, and expected evidence type. One angle is the most obvious interpretation of the assignment; the others offer alternatives that may be more original or more reportable.
  3. Produces a structured reporting checklist: primary sources to seek (with a brief note on why each matters), documents to request or locate, background reading, and questions for each source type. Ordered by priority — what to do first.
  4. Closes with a "Next Step" note: the single first action to take before any other reporting work (typically reading the original study, finding the affected individual, or filing the document request that opens other doors)

Read the full file on GitHub · 131 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 · 131 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A da2b3ff05b3a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research-brief-creator is a skill published in the GitHub repository ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills (32 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 2,121 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 2026-09-04.

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