research-skills

Skills

Agent skills for research work — autonomous iteration, scientific visualization, bibliography management, image generation, and more. Currently packaged as a Claude Code plugin, but the skills themselves are just markdown files that any coding agent can use.

Read each skill before you run it. These skills shape how your agent works. ralph-loops and confer run agents with no permission gates — they bypass all approval checks and sandboxing. Understand what a skill does before activating it.

These reflect one person's workflow, not universal best practices. Fork the repo, delete what doesn't fit, rewrite what almost fits. The best skills are the ones you've made your own.

# Claude Code
claude plugin marketplace add cailmdaley/skills
claude plugin install research-skills

# Codex (no plugin system — symlink the skills directory)
git clone https://github.com/cailmdaley/skills.git ~/.local/share/skills
ln -s ~/.local/share/skills/skills/* ~/.agents/skills/

What's here

constitution + ralph-loops — Autonomous iteration

Two skills that work together. constitution is the design document — a markdown spec describing the desired state, written to outlast any single iteration. ralph-loops is the execution engine — fresh-context loops that survey reality, contribute, and exit, repeating until the constitution is satisfied.

Use the constitution skill to draft a spec: "use the constitution skill to help me write a spec for [your goal]." Then launch with the included ralph script, which runs in a tmux session with support for both Claude Code and Codex backends. Attach to watch, steer, or update the spec mid-run.

Pattern adapted from Geoffrey Huntley's Ralph Wiggum.

confer — Cross-agent collaboration

Consult the other coding agent — Claude Code calls Codex, Codex calls Claude Code. One-shot mode for quick questions, reviews, or dispatched tasks; tmux session mode for extended back-and-forth collaboration.

data-visualization — Scientific figure design

A decision framework synthesizing Bertin, Cleveland, Tufte, Cairo, Wilke, and Knaflic. Routes from data type to visualization form, with cosmology-specific conventions (power spectra, covariance matrices, triangle plots, sky maps). Includes a visualization catalog, color palette reference, and design system.

implementing-code — Scientific coding standards

Opinionated approach to research code: conceptual density, concise conditionals, natural line breaking. Write it right the first time — clean, correct, no post-hoc cleanup needed.

managing-bibliography — arXiv + ADS citation management

Read full paper source from arXiv, fetch BibTeX from NASA ADS, generate citation keys, append to your .bib file. Requires $ADS_API_TOKEN.

nano-banana — Image generation via Gemini CLI

Generate and edit images using Gemini CLI with persistent visual memory via KV cache warmth. Two warm caches (Gemini's KV cache + Claude's context) enable iterative refinement. Includes transparency extraction via difference matting.

Requires Gemini CLI with the nanobanana extension.

pocket-tts — Local text-to-speech

Speak text aloud using pocket-tts server with streaming audio. macOS only.

Requires: pip install pocket-tts, brew install ffmpeg, a voice file at ~/.config/pocket-tts/default-voice.wav.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Reuse implies no affiliation with or endorsement by Cail Daley; listings on third-party directories are not authorized without permission.