Deep research

Deep Research — parallel multi-source orchestrator

🟢 What this is. A single Python script that fans out across 8 data sources in parallel and dumps quotable evidence into a research folder. Use it whenever you need cross-source convergence on a topic before writing anything substantive.

🔴 What this is NOT. It does not synthesize a brief, an opinion, or a post. The output is raw evidence for the writer to read and synthesize. Voice and structure happen downstream — never inside the orchestrator.

When to use

Triggering moment	Why this skill
User pastes a tweet/URL and says "research this topic" or "do a deep dive on this"	Run on the topic before manually pulling individual sources. Saves 5-10 sequential calls.
User asks "what's the discourse on X" / "what are people saying about Y"	This is literally what the tool does.
Pre-flight before any long-form artifact (deep post, briefing, founder profile, product comparison, ecosystem map)	The 8-source sweep finds links and quotes that one-source spelunking would miss.
Need to validate a thesis with cross-source convergence	If Reddit + HN + X all surface the same pattern, that's a real market signal worth a thesis.

🟡 Not the right tool for: single-event news posts where the source is one tweet (just fetch that tweet directly), or re-research of topics already covered.

How to invoke

cd skills/deep-research/scripts
python3 research.py "your topic in quotes" [flags]

Common flag combinations:

# Standard pre-flight (default depth, 30 days, ~$0.10-0.20/run)
python3 research.py "agent harness engineering"

# Quick scan (~30s, smaller limits)
python3 research.py "Stripe Sessions 2026 announcements" --depth=quick

# Deep dive (~3-4 min, deeper per-source limits, more YT transcripts)
python3 research.py "openai vs anthropic enterprise 2026" --depth=deep --yt-transcripts=4

# Specific sources only (skip the ones you know won't have signal)
python3 research.py "Mitchell Hashimoto" --sources=x,github_repos,github_issues,hn

# Short window for news-shape topics
python3 research.py "GPT-5.5 launch" --days=7

# Custom output directory
python3 research.py "claude code skills" --out=/path/to/research/claude-code-skills/

Output

🟢 Default output: ./research/<slug>/research-<date>.{json,md} (relative to current working directory).

🟢 Override with --out=<dir> for project-specific paths.

File	What's in it	Use it for
research-<date>.md	Human-readable cluster, sorted by engagement	Read first to triage which threads are worth pulling
research-<date>.json	Full structured evidence with all fields	Pull verbatim quotes, engagement numbers, URLs into the downstream artifact

The markdown groups results by source (X, Reddit, HN, GitHub repos, GitHub issues, Polymarket, YouTube, Exa) and within each section sorts by engagement signal. Each entry has the URL, engagement counts, author, date, and a quoted excerpt.

The 8 sources, what they give you

Source	Cost	Auth	What it's good for
🟢 X / Twitter (via monid tikhub/twitter/web/fetch_search_timeline)	~$0.0015/page	MONID_API_KEY	Verbatim tweets with real engagement (likes/RT/replies/views), ranked by engagement. ~20 tweets/page; deep depth pages + a Latest sweep. The single most valuable source for op-ed work.
🟢 Reddit (via monid Apify trudax/reddit-scraper-lite)	~$0.05-0.10/run	MONID_API_KEY	Operator/user opinion threads with top comments. Anti-corporate angle.
🟢 Hacker News (via monid exa/contents → Algolia JSON)	~$0.0022/call	MONID_API_KEY	Developer-community discussion. Great for tooling/product launches.
🟢 GitHub repos (via monid exa/contents → api.github.com)	~$0.0022/call	MONID_API_KEY	Star counts, release dates, license, related projects. Critical for ecosystem maps.
🟢 GitHub issues/PRs (via monid exa/contents → api.github.com)	~$0.0022/call	MONID_API_KEY	Active development threads, contested features, recent bugs. Ground-truth project status.
🟢 Polymarket (via monid exa/contents → Gamma search)	~$0.0022/call	MONID_API_KEY	Money-weighted predictions. Odds on regulatory deadlines, election outcomes, product launches.
🟢 YouTube (via monid Apify: search + transcript)	~$0.03 / 2 transcripts	MONID_API_KEY	Recent videos + full transcripts for the top N. Often game-changing for talk/interview-driven topics.
🟢 Exa neural web search (via monid blockrun.ai/api/v1/exa/search)	~$0.011/call	MONID_API_KEY	Recent grounded web content + research papers. Supports a category filter (research paper, news, github, tweet, …). Returns inline text + highlights.

🟢 Total per-run cost: ~$0.10-0.20 at default depth. No monthly subscription.

🟢 EVERY source routes through monid — one auth (MONID_API_KEY), one balance, zero per-vendor keys. Paid sources (X, Reddit, YouTube, Exa) use native monid endpoints; sources with no native monid endpoint (HN Algolia, GitHub REST, Polymarket Gamma) are proxied through blockrun.ai/api/v1/exa/contents, which returns the upstream JSON body verbatim (raw bytes, no markdown cleaning) for ~$0.0022/call.

🔴 Do NOT proxy JSON through blockrun.ai/api/v1/surf/web/fetch — it runs a markdown cleaner that collapses whitespace inside JSON strings and mangles embedded URLs, producing invalid JSON on large/prose-heavy responses (GitHub issue bodies, Polymarket descriptions). Use exa/contents (raw passthrough) instead — that's what _monid.fetch_json does.

🟡 Per-source budget rules:

• Reddit costs scale with results × 0.0057 + a base scrape fee. A "deep" run can hit $0.25.
• YouTube transcripts cost $0.0075 per video — start with --yt-transcripts=2, raise to 4+ only if the topic is YouTube-heavy.
• X (tikhub) is $0.0015/page; default depth pulls 2 pages ($0.003), deep pulls 3 + a Latest sweep.
• HN/GitHub/Polymarket proxy calls are ~$0.0022 each. Polymarket Gamma is capped at limit_per_type=8 — exa livecrawl 504s on the ~1MB payload above that.

Example workflow

1. User: "do a deep dive on Greg Isenberg's agent agency podcast"
2. Read the source URL (the tweet, the YouTube link)
3. Run: python3 research.py "Greg Isenberg agent agency Hermes Orgo"
4. Wait ~60-90s for all 8 sources
5. Open research-<date>.md, scan the X + Reddit + Exa sections
6. For each high-signal post, pull the verbatim text from research-<date>.json
7. Draft your artifact with verbatim quotes lifted directly from the JSON

🔴 Critical rule: this skill produces research input, not draft output. Never copy/paste sentences from research-<date>.md into the artifact you're writing. Always pull the underlying primary source (tweet text, blog excerpt, GitHub description) from the .json and synthesize in your own voice downstream.

Voice contract

This skill must not synthesize editorial prose or take positions. Its only job is to retrieve, normalize, and rank.

If the script ever starts emitting things like "the takeaway is...", "this represents a shift...", or "the bottom line:", that's a bug — remove it. The synthesis is what humans (or downstream editorial workflows) do.

Files

Path	What
SKILL.md	This file
scripts/research.py	The orchestrator (CLI entry)
scripts/sources/_monid.py	Shared monid runner: run_monid (retry/backoff) + fetch_json (raw-JSON via exa/contents) — used by ALL sources
scripts/sources/reddit.py	Reddit via monid Apify
scripts/sources/hackernews.py	HN Algolia via monid exa/contents
scripts/sources/polymarket.py	Polymarket Gamma via monid exa/contents
scripts/sources/github.py	GitHub REST via monid exa/contents
scripts/sources/x_twitter.py	X via monid tikhub
scripts/sources/youtube.py	YouTube via monid Apify
scripts/sources/exa.py	Exa neural search via monid (blockrun.ai proxy)

Required env

Env var	Used by	Required for
MONID_API_KEY	_monid.py → ALL sources	Everything — every source routes through monid

🟢 One key for everything. Set MONID_API_KEY in your environment and ensure your monid balance is funded.

🟡 Optional env var: MONID_BIN — path to the monid CLI binary. Defaults to a monid lookup on $PATH. Set this if you've installed monid in a non-standard location.

🟡 Missing-auth behavior: if MONID_API_KEY is unset, sources return empty and the orchestrator logs warnings but still completes (with no data). Ensure the key + a funded monid balance before running.

Installing monid

This skill depends on the monid CLI. Install it with:

npm install -g monid
# or, if you prefer a local install:
npm install monid
export MONID_BIN="$(pwd)/node_modules/.bin/monid"

Get an API key at monid.dev and export it:

export MONID_API_KEY=your_key_here

Known gotchas

Gotcha	Mitigation
🔴 Never proxy JSON through surf/web/fetch — its markdown cleaner corrupts large/prose-heavy JSON (mangles embedded URLs → invalid JSON)	Use exa/contents (raw passthrough). _monid.fetch_json already does this. Verified clean on 166KB GitHub issue payloads.
🔴 exa/contents 504s (CRAWL_LIVECRAWL_TIMEOUT) on ~1MB+ responses, and transiently even on small ones	fetch_json retries the no-results case with backoff (2 retries). Polymarket Gamma is capped at limit_per_type=8; keep GitHub per_page<=15.
🟡 Reddit's Apify upVotes field returns 1 as default when the scraper skips engagement metadata	Module filters on "any score or any comments or has body or has top comments" instead of a hard floor. Trust the human reading the markdown to rank by relevance.
🟡 Reddit can return 0 results for low-volume topics	Try a broader query, then filter manually.
🔴 GitHub /search/issues requires is:issue or is:pr (returns 422 otherwise as of 2026-05)	Already handled in github.py — module appends is:issue automatically.
🟡 HN: web/fetch-style cleaners mangle Algolia story_text/_highlightResult (legacy note; exa/contents avoids this)	hackernews.py still requests attributesToHighlight=["none"] + a tight field whitelist to keep payloads small and URL-free — defensive even with the raw path.
🔴 tikhub (X) intermittently returns an HTML error page (Unexpected token '<') under rate-limiting — ~1 in 3 calls	Already handled: _monid.py detects transient HTML/UNKNOWN errors and retries with exponential backoff (2 retries default). If X still returns 0, re-run or lower depth.
🟡 tikhub (X) has no date param — date filtering is client-side from each tweet's created_at	x_twitter.py parses created_at and filters to the --days window; undated tweets are kept rather than dropped. Use short keywords (1-2 words), not sentences.
🟡 Polymarket Gamma keyword search ignores very short terms (e.g. "AI")	Use longer queries ("artificial intelligence"); the orchestrator passes the full topic.
🔴 YouTube scraper input field is searchQueries, NOT searchKeywords	Already handled in youtube.py. Apify schema change in Apr 2026.
🟢 No persistent state. Each run is independent.	Re-running on the same topic costs the same as the first run — sources are not cached. Plan accordingly.

Updating this skill

When a source's input schema changes, GitHub adds a new search filter, or a monid endpoint changes — update the relevant sources/*.py and bump the Known gotchas section. Everything goes through sources/_monid.py:

• Native monid endpoint (X, Reddit, YouTube, Exa): call run_monid(provider, endpoint, body=/query=/path=, retries=) and normalize result["output"].
• No native endpoint (HN, GitHub, Polymarket — arbitrary JSON REST): call fetch_json(url) which proxies through exa/contents and returns parsed JSON. NEVER use surf/web/fetch for JSON (markdown cleaner corrupts it).

To add a source: monid discover → monid inspect the schema → write a thin sources/<name>.py using whichever helper fits. Treat this SKILL.md as a living spec.

Credits

Originally inspired by mvanhorn/last30days-skill. The 30-day default window came from that upstream; everything else (the 8-source fan-out, the monid routing, the _monid.py helpers, the per-source modules) was rebuilt from scratch.