research-engineer-scientist-tokens
Guides research engineering and science on LLM tokens—hypotheses about context use, tokenization, compression, and inference efficiency; rigorous benchmarks (tokens per task, quality–cost Pareto); ablation design; instrumentation and reproducible logs; and research memos that inform product decisions. Use when designing token-efficiency experiments, measuring context utilization, comparing compression or routing methods, analyzing tokenizer effects, or writing technical reports on token/cost trade-offs—not for phased cost roadmaps and owners (ai-token-improvement-plan-engineer), production context pipeline implementation (ai-context-engineer), single-prompt edits (prompt-engineer), general non-token AI research (ai-researcher), or shipping features (ai-engineer).
NPX Install
npx skill4agent add daemon-blockint-tech/agentic-enteprises-skill research-engineer-scientist-tokensTags
Translated version includes tags in frontmatterSKILL.md Content
View Translation Comparison →Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Tokens
When to Use
- Frame research questions on tokens, context length, or inference cost
- Design experiments with baselines, ablations, and statistical rigor
- Build benchmarks for tokens-per-successful-task, effective context, cache leverage
- Measure tokenizer and formatting effects on length and model behavior
- Evaluate compression, summarization, routing, or distillation for token savings
- Analyze long-context phenomena (needle, lost-in-middle, attention budget)
- Write research memos with reproducible methods and honest limitations
- Translate findings into actionable thresholds for engineering and product
When NOT to Use
- Executive token reduction program with phased rollout →
ai-token-improvement-plan-engineer - Implement context packing, compaction code paths →
ai-context-engineer - Rewrite one production prompt →
prompt-engineer - General literature survey unrelated to tokens →
ai-researcher - Production RAG/agent deployment →
ai-engineer - Classical ML without LLM token focus →
data-scientist
Related skills
| Need | Skill |
|---|---|
| General research methodology | |
| Cost improvement program / roadmap | |
| Production context assembly | |
| Prompt wording and eval harness | |
| RAG and agent runtime build | |
| Statistical testing and cohort analysis | |
| Adversarial robustness of compressed context | |
| Commercial AI architecture | |
Core Workflows
1. Research framing (tokens)
references/research_framing_tokens.md2. Measurement and instrumentation
references/measurement_instrumentation.md3. Experiment design and ablations
references/experiment_design_ablations.md4. Context, tokenization, and long-context
references/context_tokenization_longcontext.md5. Compression and efficiency methods
references/compression_efficiency_methods.md6. Reproducibility and research reporting
references/reproducibility_reporting.mdOutputs
- Pre-registration / experiment plan — hypothesis, metrics, stop criteria
- Results table — mean ± CI; tokens and quality side by side
- Pareto chart narrative — quality vs tokens at operating points
- Ablation appendix — what mattered, what did not
- Research memo — conclusion, limits, recommended next build
- Artifact bundle — configs, seeds, eval scripts, hashed datasets
Principles
- Report tokens and quality together — never optimize one without the other
- Match tokenizer and model — counts from the deployment tokenizer/API
- Control confounds — temperature, system prompt, tool schemas held fixed across arms
- Pre-register primary metric — avoid p-hacking across slice metrics
- Separate science from rollout — research recommends; owns program
ai-token-improvement-plan-engineer