codebase-research

A method for deeply examining a codebase before security testing or proof-of-concept work. It maps how the software is structured, how data moves, and where trust boundaries and side effects exist.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to understand architecture, dataflow, invariants, trust boundaries, recent change risks, and promising branches for testing.
Why use it?
It helps reveal risky changes, hidden assumptions, and important code paths before further investigation begins.

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/vyntra-research/proteus/codebase-research
Any agent
npx skills add Vyntra-Research/Proteus --skill codebase-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Vyntra-Research/Proteus

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 64 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,113 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin unknown 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 $0.00064 $0.01113
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00557
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00223
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00111

Measured 2d ago against content hash 51774fc07178, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

codebase-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.

plugins/proteus/skills/codebase-research/SKILL.md · 119 lines

The source is not reproduced here

Licensed GPL-3.0

The repository is licensed GPL-3.0, which this catalogue does not treat as permission to reproduce the file. Read it at the source.

Read it on GitHub

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 · 119 lines · 64 tokens per session scan A 51774fc07178

Subscribe to this mod's changes

codebase-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository Vyntra-Research/Proteus (29 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed GPL-3.0. It adds 64 tokens to every session and 1,113 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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