BF tavily-research
Conduct comprehensive AI-powered research with citations via the Tavily CLI. Use this skill when the user wants deep research, a detailed report, a comparison, market analysis, literature review, or says "research", "investigate", "analyze in depth", "compare X vs Y", "what does the market look like for", or needs multi-source synthesis with explicit citations. Returns a structured report grounded in web sources. Takes 30-120 seconds. For quick fact-finding, use tavily-search instead.
As a process F 47/100 · Will not run — References files that are not bundled: ../tavily-cli/SKILL.md, ../tavily-search/SKILL.md, ../tavily-crawl/SKILL.md
What is at stake
Medium-severity findings: the skill is probably honest, but read what alarmed the scanner.
Below is the worst case for this category. The finding here is medium: the guard saw a sign, not a proof.
The skill contains commands that delete files, rewrite disks or execute code fetched from the network. The agent may run them without asking if it believes the instructions require it.
Replace destructive commands with safe equivalents that ask for confirmation, scope them to one folder, and stop piping curl into a shell: pin a version and a checksum.
How to improve
- The text references files that are not there: add them or drop the references.
- Your own cases (evals/evals.json, 4–6 real requests with expected answers): the full check would then run those instead of a model-drafted suite.
- A spec.yaml with trigger phrases and assertions — a behaviour contract for CI; `skilltest init` writes a template.
Guard findings · 1
✓ No critical or high findings
Medium and low: 1
-
medium Dangerous commands
cmd-pipe-to-shellSKILL.md:17Downloads and executes remote code from an unrecognised host (pipe to shell) (the skill's own vendor host)curl -fsSL https://cli.tavily.com/install.sh | bash && tvly login
vendor-host
Files scanned: 3. Evidence is masked. Grey chips explain why severity was lowered.
Against the Agent Skills spec
- warning
missing-refreference to a missing file: ../tavily-cli/SKILL.md - warning
missing-refreference to a missing file: ../tavily-search/SKILL.md - warning
missing-refreference to a missing file: ../tavily-crawl/SKILL.md
Process rating: all ten parameters 47/100
- 0Tools and files. 3 referenced file(s) missing: ../tavily-cli/SKILL.md, ../tavily-search/SKILL.md, ../tavily-crawl/SKILL.md
- 0Result and completion. Does not say what the result is
- 0Inputs and preconditions. Does not say what the process needs to start
- 0Progress reporting. Says nothing while it works
- 40Consistency. Frontmatter name (tavily-research) differs from the folder (content-system-tavily-research)
- 70When it triggers. States when to use, but not when not to
- 100Steps. 11 steps
- 100Failures and branches. 1 branches, has a failure section
- 100Execution cost. Instruction body is 746 tokens
- 100Running it twice. No mutating operations
Everything here is measured from the skill text rather than judged by a model, so the numbers are checkable. A parameter weighs more when it is a more common reason for the process to stall.
Quality signals
- +4Description does not say when NOT to use the skill (false activations)
- +3Output format is not stated: the model decides each time
- +1No license
- +2Single-language instructions
- +5Description quotes 5 example trigger phrases
- +3Description length 489: enough signal without eating the budget
- +4Structure: 9 headings
- +3Step-by-step instructions: 11 items
- +4Has examples (3 code blocks)
Quality base 70; lint remarks subtract, signals add up to 100. Result: 77.