What Are AI Research Skills?
AI Research Skills by Orchestra Research is a library of 86 skills across 22 categories that enables autonomous AI research — from initial idea to published paper. It works with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, and any agent that supports the SKILL.md standard.
With 5K+ GitHub stars, it's the go-to skill library for ML researchers who want to accelerate their workflow.
The 22 Categories
The skills cover the entire AI/ML research lifecycle:
| Stage | Categories |
|---|---|
| Discovery | Autoresearch, Ideation, ML Paper Reading |
| Design | Model Architecture, Experiment Design |
| Build | Fine-Tuning, Post-Training, Distributed Training |
| Optimize | Optimization, Inference, Quantization |
| Evaluate | Benchmarking, Evaluation, Ablation Studies |
| Apply | Agents, RAG, Multimodal, Tool Use |
| Understand | Mechanistic Interpretability, Emerging Techniques |
| Govern | Safety & Alignment, Ethics |
| Write | ML Paper Writing, Scientific Communication |
Quick Start
One-Command Install
npx @orchestra-research/ai-research-skillsThis copies all 86 skills to your local .claude/skills/ directory (or equivalent for your agent).
Manual Install
git clone https://github.com/Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs.git
cp -r AI-Research-SKILLs/skills/* ~/.claude/skills/The Autoresearch Skill
The standout feature is the autoresearch skill — a meta-skill that orchestrates the full research loop:
- Idea Generation — brainstorm research questions from a topic
- Literature Review — search and summarize related work
- Experiment Design — plan the methodology
- Implementation — write and run code
- Analysis — interpret results, generate plots
- Paper Writing — draft the manuscript with proper structure
You trigger it with a single prompt:
Use the autoresearch skill to investigate whether sparse attention patterns
in vision transformers can match dense attention on ImageNet while reducing
FLOPs by 50%.The agent then works through the full loop, checking in with you at each stage.
Creating Your Own Skills
Orchestra provides a skill creation guide and template:
cat skills/docs/SKILL_CREATION_GUIDE.md
cat skills/docs/SKILL_TEMPLATE.mdEach skill is a Markdown file with:
- Description — what it does
- Instructions — step-by-step agent behavior
- Tools — required APIs/libraries
- Examples — sample interactions
Who Is This For?
- ML researchers wanting to automate literature reviews and experiment iterations
- PhD students who need help structuring papers and running ablations
- Research engineers building reproducible training pipelines
- Anyone who wants their coding agent to understand ML research deeply