idea-critic

idea-critic is an agent for Claude Code from andrehuang/researcher-pack. It costs 48 tokens per session (1,637 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An adversarial evaluator for research ideas that scores them across novelty, impact, timing, feasibility, competition, core contribution, and story. It returns a Pursue, Refine, or Kill recommendation.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps assess research proposals, compare them with existing work, identify weaknesses, and decide whether to continue, revise, or abandon an idea.
Why use it?
It helps reveal whether an idea is original and worthwhile before substantial research time is invested.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: a Claude Code subagent (agents/*.md). Also seen: model in frontmatter; reads .claude/ paths.

Good fit It helps assess research proposals, compare them with existing work, identify weaknesses, and decide whether to continue, revise, or abandon an idea.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/andrehuang/researcher-pack/idea-critic
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.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/andrehuang/researcher-pack

Made for: Claude Code.

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 idea-critic

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/andrehuang/researcher-pack/idea-critic.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/andrehuang/researcher-pack/idea-critic)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/andrehuang/researcher-pack/idea-critic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/andrehuang/researcher-pack/idea-critic.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 48 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,637 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 $0.00048 $0.01637
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00818
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00327
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00164

Measured 8d ago against content hash 3e855a25e3d3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

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 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.

agents/idea-critic.md · 130 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 130 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 principles/research-strategy.md file relative to your plugin directory, or at ~/.claude/principles/research-strategy.md if installed locally.

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.

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 WebSearch to 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?

3. Timing

Key question: Is the field ready for this? Too early? Already crowded?

Read the full file on GitHub · 130 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 · 130 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 3e855a25e3d3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

idea-critic is an agent published in the GitHub repository andrehuang/researcher-pack (49 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 1,637 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.