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.
npx skills add WenyuChiou/research-hub --skill research-design-helpergit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/WenyuChiou/research-hubWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/wenyuchiou/research-hub/research-design-helper)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wenyuchiou/research-hub/research-design-helper"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wenyuchiou/research-hub/research-design-helper/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wenyuchiou/research-hub/research-design-helper"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wenyuchiou/research-hub/research-design-helper.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00163 | $0.02782 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00081 | $0.01391 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00033 | $0.00556 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00016 | $0.00278 |
Grade A, and why
research-design-helper 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 11d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 147 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
research-design-helper
Stage 3a (sharp problem framing) and front-of-Stage 4 (model design) helper. Part of the research-hub skill pack — works alongside Zotero, Obsidian, and NotebookLM workflows but does not require any of them. Domain-agnostic Socratic guide that walks a researcher through 5 short segments and saves the result as .research/design_brief.md.
The skill does not invent your research question or model design. Like research-context-compressor, it leaves blanks rather than guess. Its value is structured prompting: forcing you to articulate what you'd otherwise leave implicit, before you spend weeks coding.
When to use
Trigger phrases:
- "Frame this research question."
- "Design my study before I start coding."
- "Help me think through what model to build."
- "Sharpen my hypothesis."
- "Walk me through the design."
- "Build a design brief."
Not for:
- Writing actual model code (that's the user's work, optionally with
codex-delegatefor boilerplate). - Project context manifests (that's
research-context-compressor). - Literature comparison (that's
literature-triage-matrix). - Manuscript writing (that's
academic-writing-skills).
Inputs
In priority order:
.research/project_manifest.ymlif it exists — for project context (research_question may already be partially filled)..research/topic_dossier.gaps.ymlif it exists — Stage 2 handoff fromgap-to-topic(plugin v0.3.12+). Read only the chosengaps[]entry plus the top-levelopen_questions[], NOT the full file. The chosen entry is identified byverdict: conditional-go(orverdict: go); the workflow §0 step pre-fills segment 1 (RQ) fromgaps[].statementand segment 5 (risks) fromopen_questions[]+ the specific concern hinted bygaps[].feasibility. This satisfies the conversational-skill rule below — no whole-corpus scan, only one structured handoff record..research/design_brief.mdif it exists — for refresh, not first-run..research/literature_matrix.mdif it exists — for prior-art context when discussing identifiability.- The user's free-text answers during the conversation.
What ships with it
5 files 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.
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.
- 11d ago First seen · 147 lines · 163 tokens per session scan A 3a7f8e1ae443
research-design-helper is a skill published in the GitHub repository WenyuChiou/research-hub (54 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 163 tokens to every session and 2,782 once invoked, about $0.0008 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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