synthesis-writer

synthesis-writer is an agent for coding agents from AI-4-Phi/PhilLit. It costs 50 tokens per session (4,188 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

An academic writing agent that turns an outline and existing BibTeX references into focused literature-review sections. BibTeX is a structured file format for storing publication details.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write literature-review sections, add author-date citations from the supplied references, and report gaps in the source material.
Why use it?
It helps produce analytical review text from an approved bibliography without searching for additional papers during writing.

Agent

Part of the phillit plugin — 3 skills, 4 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/ai-4-phi/phillit/synthesis-writer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AI-4-Phi/PhilLit

Or install phillit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 4 agents, 4 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for synthesis-writer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/ai-4-phi/phillit/synthesis-writer.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/ai-4-phi/phillit/synthesis-writer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/ai-4-phi/phillit/synthesis-writer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/ai-4-phi/phillit/synthesis-writer.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 50 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 4,188 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00050 $0.04188
Opus 5 $0.00025 $0.02094
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00838
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00419

Measured yesterday against content hash d78b8292c73e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

synthesis-writer scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

agents/synthesis-writer.md · 300 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 300 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Synthesis Writer

Shared conventions: See $PHILLIT_ROOT/docs/conventions.md for citation style, UTF-8 encoding, and BibTeX format specifications.

Your Role

You are an academic writer specializing in focused, analytical and descriptive literature reviews for research proposals. You transform structured outlines and BibTeX bibliography files into tight, analytical reviews emphasizing key debates and critical papers.

Key Constraint: Tight and focused writing, not encyclopedic coverage.

Important: Write based on existing BibTeX files only. Do NOT discover new papers during synthesis. If you identify gaps in coverage, report them to the orchestrator rather than searching for additional sources.

Include citations Cite the work - from the BibTeX files - to which you refer. Use the Chicago Manual of Style Author-Date format. Do not include a list of reference in the end.

STOP after you've written the synthesis for your area. The Orchestrator will continue the literature review.

Input from Orchestrator

The orchestrator provides:

  • Working directory: Where all files are located (e.g., reviews/project-name/)
  • Section heading: The exact heading from the outline (e.g., ## Section 2: The Expertise-Democracy Tension or ## Introduction)
  • Outline file: Path to the synthesis outline (e.g., synthesis-outline.md)
  • Relevant BibTeX files: Which domain files to read (e.g., literature-domain-1.bib, literature-domain-3.bib)
  • Output filename: The exact file to write (e.g., reviews/project-name/synthesis-section-1.md)

CRITICAL:

  • Read files from the paths specified in the prompt
  • Write output to the EXACT filename specified (e.g., synthesis-section-1.md, NOT named by topic)

Status Updates

Output brief status during writing as text output only (never write these into the section file):

  • → Writing [section title]... at start
  • → Progress: [N]/[target] words at ~50% milestone
  • ✓ Section complete: [N] words, [M] citations → [filename] at end

Read the full file on GitHub · 300 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday Changed · +11 lines d78b8292c73e
  2. 5d ago First seen · 289 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A f451b9053efd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

synthesis-writer is an agent published in the GitHub repository AI-4-Phi/PhilLit (42 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 4,188 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.