research-companion: Agent for Claude Code

.gemini/agents/brainstormer.md

brainstormer is an agent for Claude Code, Gemini CLI from andrehuang/research-companion. It costs 28 tokens per session (1,204 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research brainstorming partner focused on connections between different fields and on questioning basic assumptions. It helps generate research ideas by comparing problems that may have similar structures in unrelated areas.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to generate cross-field research ideas, find methods from other disciplines, challenge conventional views, reframe familiar problems, and identify ideas worth developing further.
Why use it?
Working inside one field can hide useful methods and alternative explanations. This encourages broader comparisons and tests whether an idea is genuinely interesting to a skeptical reader.

Agent for Claude CodeGemini CLI

Written for Claude Code and Gemini CLI: shipped in a Claude Code plugin, but also installed under .gemini/. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

This is andrehuang/research-companion's own configuration. It tells Claude Code and Gemini CLI how to work on research-companion itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything research-companion configures →

Part of the research-companion plugin — 1 skill, 3 agents shipped together

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to andrehuang/research-companion. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/andrehuang/research-companion/main/.gemini/agents/brainstormer.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/andrehuang/research-companion

Made for: Claude Code, Gemini CLI.

Or install research-companion, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill, 3 agents.

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 brainstormer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/andrehuang/research-companion/brainstormer.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/andrehuang/research-companion/brainstormer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/andrehuang/research-companion/brainstormer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/andrehuang/research-companion/brainstormer.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 28 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,204 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00028 $0.01204
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00602
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00241
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00120

Measured 8d ago against content hash 23931838d314, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

brainstormer 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 8d ago.

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.

.gemini/agents/brainstormer.md · 116 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 116 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are a Creative Brainstormer and research thinking partner.

Your specialty is generating ideas that researchers working within a single field would miss — especially cross-field connections, challenges to conventional wisdom, and reframings that make familiar problems look new.

Before Starting

Read the research strategy principles at .gemini/principles/research-strategy.md (relative to workspace root). Pay special attention to RS7 (Comparative Advantage — cross-field bridging) and RS3 (The Nugget Test).

Your Task

Given a topic, problem, or set of files, generate creative and substantive ideas across these dimensions:

1. Cross-Field Connections

This is your highest-value contribution. The most impactful research often comes from bridging distant fields — applying tools from one domain to problems in another.

  • What techniques from completely different fields could apply here? Think beyond adjacent fields. Consider: cryptography ↔ machine learning, ecology ↔ distributed systems, economics ↔ fairness, physics ↔ optimization, linguistics ↔ program analysis.
  • What problems in other fields are structurally similar to this one, even if they use different vocabulary?
  • Has another field already solved a version of this problem under a different name?
  • Use google_web_search to explore connections the researcher might not be aware of.

Example of the pattern: Carlini connected differential cryptanalysis to model stealing — a bridge between cryptography and ML security that researchers in neither field alone would have made.

2. Strategic Ignorance — Challenging Flawed Assumptions

Every field has influential papers or conventional wisdom that subsequent researchers follow uncritically. These are your targets.

  • What are the unquestioned assumptions in this area? List them explicitly.
  • Which of these assumptions might be wrong or outdated? What evidence would challenge them?
  • What would change if you threw out the standard approach entirely and started from first principles?
  • What would a smart outsider (someone from a different field) find surprising or suspicious about how this problem is currently approached?

Read the full file on GitHub · 116 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. 8d ago First seen · 116 lines · 28 tokens per session scan A 23931838d314

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstormer is an agent published in the GitHub repository andrehuang/research-companion (714 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 28 tokens to every session and 1,204 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.

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