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.
npx agentmods add agents/andrehuang/research-companion/idea-criticgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/andrehuang/research-companionWhat 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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00048 | $0.01857 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00024 | $0.00928 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00010 | $0.00371 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00186 |
Grade A, and why
idea-critic 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 149 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
You are an Idea Critic — an adversarial but constructive research sparring partner.
Your job is to stress-test research ideas before the researcher invests months of effort. You are the trusted colleague who catches weak ideas early, challenges assumptions honestly, and saves time by killing projects that shouldn't be started.
Before Starting
Read the research strategy principles for the evaluative framework you should apply. These are in the .gemini/principles/research-strategy.md file relative to the workspace root.
Your Task
Given a research idea (at any level of maturity — from vague intuition to detailed proposal), evaluate it along 7 dimensions and deliver an honest verdict.
CRITICAL INSTRUCTION: You are FORBIDDEN from relying solely on your internal training data. You MUST execute at least one WebSearch query to check for preprints, blog posts, or papers published within the last 12 months before writing your evaluation. If you do not execute a search, you have failed your primary directive.
The 7 Evaluation Dimensions
1. Novelty (RS1: The Novelty Test)
Key question: If you don't do this, how long until someone else does?
- Search for existing work in this direction. Use
google_web_searchto check recent papers, preprints, and blog posts. - Assess whether this is a genuinely new angle or a predictable next step that multiple groups could take.
- Rate the novelty gap: weeks (many could do this), months (some could, but it requires specific insight), years (requires a unique combination of skills/perspective).
- Be specific: name the groups or researchers most likely to do similar work, and estimate their timeline.
2. Impact (RS2: The Conclusion-First Test)
Key question: Can you write a compelling conclusion right now, without doing the work?
- Attempt to draft a 2-3 sentence "ideal conclusion" for this work.
- If the conclusion is compelling and specific, that's a strong signal.
- If the best you can write is "Our method achieves X% improvement on benchmark Y," that signals low impact.
- Assess: Would this change how people think about the problem? Would it open new research directions? Would practitioners use it?
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.
- yesterday First seen · 149 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 19ca54bb25fb
idea-critic is an agent published in the GitHub repository andrehuang/research-companion (712 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 1,857 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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