Cowork Research

cowork-research

A Claude Cowork plugin (also runs in Claude Code) that turns your assistant into a full-time research analyst — brand briefs, web audits, and meeting recaps that compound across every business decision you make.

Stop pasting links into ChatGPT. Your assistant already knows your business, your ICP, and your offer. Give it the right tools and it researches in your voice.

Built by Nuno Tavares for VCInc cohort students and anyone who wants research that accumulates instead of evaporating after every conversation.

Why this exists

In April 2026, Andrej Karpathy published LLM Wiki, a gist that crystallized the markdown-vault-as-second-brain pattern:

"Obsidian is the IDE, the LLM is the programmer, the wiki is the codebase. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually."

Corey Ganim's framing applies the same idea to research specifically:

"Stop treating Cowork like a chatbot. Treat it like an employee. The first day on the job, you tell it about your business. After that, every research task is just delegation."

Same pattern, two voices. Both point at the same thing: a research workflow where your assistant already knows the context, has the right tools wired up, and writes outputs that match how YOU think. This plugin is the install + scaffold + wiring that makes that practical for Claude Cowork users.

cowork-research soft-depends on cowork-ai-os for identity (about-me/about-me.md, business-brain.md, connections.md). When cowork-ai-os v0.10.2+ is detected, the wizard's Phase 2 delegates connector recommendations to the live /browse-connectors skill — which fetches claude.com/connectors at runtime, so you always get the current catalog instead of a stale bundled snapshot. Older versions still work via the bundled fallback.

What it ships (5 skills)

That's the whole surface. Five commands. Run /onboard-research once and the wizard wires the rest.

How memory works (the 4 tiers)

Borrowed from cowork-obsidian's memory architecture. Same pattern, applied to research outputs instead of vault notes.

A typical research query touches ~3,500 tokens, not 50,000. Past briefs become input context for new ones. Audits inform briefs. Meeting recaps surface in account research. The library compounds.

Per-business-type connector matrix

Phase 2 of the wizard reads your business-brain.md, classifies you into one of 6 business types, and recommends the top 3 connectors for that type. Here's the matrix:

Why these picks (full reasoning per type): see docs/architecture.md and the per-type personalization profiles at skills/onboard-research/personalization/.

The wizard never installs MCP servers for you — it surfaces paste-ready install instructions and verifies what's already wired. Your environment, your call.

⚡ 1-minute install

/plugin marketplace add AutomatedMarketer/cowork-research
/plugin install cowork-research@cowork-research
/onboard-research

That's it. The wizard is resumable — stop any time, pick up where you left off.

Dependencies

cowork-research is standalone but plays nice with the rest of the Cowork AI OS family:

• Soft-depends on cowork-ai-os >= 0.10 — for identity files (about-me/about-me.md, business-brain.md, connections.md). The wizard halts cleanly with a paste-ready prompt if these are missing. Without them the assistant has no idea who you are or what your ICP looks like.
• cowork-ai-os >= 0.10.2 recommended — Phase 2 of the wizard delegates to /browse-connectors, which v0.10.2 made live (fetches claude.com/connectors at runtime). On v0.10.0 / v0.10.1 the wizard still works — it falls back to the bundled connector catalog (verified 2026-05-14, may drift).
• Optionally integrates with cowork-obsidian >= 0.5 — if you have a vault, Phase 3 of the wizard offers it as the research destination. Brief + audit + recap outputs land in wiki/research/ instead of reference/research/. Fold-back into the wiki is offered, never required.

How it works (no jargon)

When you run /research-brief, here's what happens under the hood:

1. The skill reads your about-me/business-brain.md to know your ICP, voice, and what "competitor" means in your world.
2. It reads reference/_research-hot.md for the current state of your research library.
3. It picks the right MCPs based on the topic — Perplexity for synthesis, Firecrawl for scraping, VidIQ for YouTube, Fathom for meeting recall.
4. It drafts the brief in YOUR voice (calibrated during onboarding).
5. It shows you the plan before writing anything to disk.
6. On approval, it saves to reference/research/briefs/<topic>.md AND updates the index AND appends to memory.

No MCP server required for the plugin itself — Cowork has filesystem access. The MCPs are for external data (Perplexity, Firecrawl, VidIQ, Fathom) and you wire them once during Phase 2.

Shipped in v0.2

• ✅ /save-clip browser clipper — paste any URL → clean markdown in reference/research/clips/. Firecrawl primary + Playwright fallback. Plan-then-approve. ICP-matched tags from business-brain.md. The capture step that turns the library into a flywheel.

What's NOT in v0.2

Deferred to v0.3+ to keep this release focused:

• ❌ /competitive-monitor — scheduled re-runs of audits with diff detection. Phase D in the roadmap.
• ❌ /research-query — natural-language search across reference/research/.
• ❌ Fireflies MCP support — Fathom-only in v0.2; Fireflies is a swap-in for v0.3.
• ❌ Notion rich-block writing — plain markdown only in v0.2; rich blocks in v0.3.
• ❌ VidIQ-deep skill (/youtube-competitive) — for now use the existing VidIQ MCP tools directly.
• ❌ Stop-hook auto-extract-to-research-library — v0.3 will fold session learnings back into reference/research/ automatically.
• ❌ Chrome extension integration — paste-URL workflow only in v0.2.
• ❌ Custom Cowork MCP server — once we've watched 20+ users hit specific friction, we'll ship research_get, research_search, index_resolve as first-class MCP tools.

Who this is for

• Solo coaches — competitive context on the methodologies your clients ask about
• Agency owners — pre-call account research and free-value audits as sales lead-ins
• Creators — outlier detection and trend research that's actually current
• Course creators — competing-course teardowns with structured comparison
• Solopreneurs / SMB owners — one-off briefs on whatever is most-pressing this week
• Sales-led B2B — target-account briefs with tech stack + recent news + likely buying triggers

If you've watched ChatGPT forget your business context for the 50th time, or your "competitor research doc" is a Slack channel of pasted links no one reads, this is the alternative.

Install

Mac

🍎 ✅ Mac install (recommended): zip upload

⚠️ Already tried installing this plugin before? Read this first.

Cowork has a known Mac quirk: if you've previously uploaded a plugin with the same name (even a failed or stale attempt), the next upload is silently rejected — no error toast, no log line, the new zip just doesn't replace the old one. This happens because Cowork sends overwrite=false on every upload and there's no UI affordance to override it.

Fix before you re-upload (30 seconds):

1. 🗑️ Open Claude Cowork → Settings → Customize → Plugins (or Skills, depending on Cowork version)
2. Find any existing entry for cowork-research — including manually-repacked attempts or stale uploads
3. Remove / delete it (trash icon, "Uninstall", or "Remove")
4. 🔄 Quit Cowork fully → relaunch (clears the in-memory marketplace cache)
5. Proceed to the install steps below

If this is your first time installing this plugin, skip this section.

This is the recommended install path for all Mac users. It bypasses Anthropic's open Cowork-on-macOS bugs (🚧 #26951, 🚧 #28125) and works on every Cowork build that supports plugin uploads. Workaround confirmed by users in #39400.

⏱️ 6 steps, ~30 seconds

1. 📦 Download the latest cowork-research-v0.2.0.zip (or cowork-research.zip) from the Releases page → Assets. Don't extract it. Keep the file as a single .zip.

   ⚠️ Important: download the zip from the Releases page, NOT the green ❌ Download ZIP button at the top of the repo page. That button wraps the repo in an outer folder (cowork-research-main/) which double-nests the plugin and breaks Cowork's validator.

2. ⚙️ Open Claude Cowork (the middle tab in Claude Desktop) → click your name (top right) → Settings.
3. 🔌 Customize → Browse plugins → look for the option to upload a custom plugin file.

   💡 Menu wording varies slightly between Cowork versions — look for "Upload", "Custom plugin", or "From file".

4. 📤 Drag in the zip. Wait for confirmation.
5. 🚀 Open a brand new Cowork task (skills load on session start, not retroactively).
6. Type /onboard-research and follow the wizard.

💡 Why this is the recommended Mac path: Anthropic closed #27196 ("All Anthropic plugins fail in Cowork on macOS") as not planned — they don't currently intend to fix the marketplace path on Mac. The zip-upload path is effectively the supported install method on macOS going forward.

🐛 Troubleshooting

Windows

/plugin marketplace add AutomatedMarketer/cowork-research
/plugin install cowork-research@cowork-research

/onboard-research

Linux

/plugin marketplace add AutomatedMarketer/cowork-research
/plugin install cowork-research@cowork-research
/onboard-research

Coordination with the Cowork AI OS family

Cohort install order: cowork-ai-os first → cowork-obsidian (if you want a vault) → cowork-research.

License

MIT — yours forever.

Built by

Nuno Tavares — Newsletter: automatedmarketer.net · YouTube: @AutomatedMarketer

Links

• Anthropic Claude Code docs
• cowork-ai-os plugin — identity + connector layer
• cowork-obsidian plugin — second-brain layer
• Karpathy's LLM Wiki gist — the framing