researcher

A research agent that investigates technical questions using source code, software-development documentation, and formal specifications in an isolated context.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to examine how a codebase, software development kit, or specification works before making technical decisions.
Why use it?
It helps gather evidence from primary technical sources without mixing the research process into the main work session.

Agent

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/cofin/flow/researcher
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cofin/flow
Per session 21 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 316 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 $0.00021 $0.00316
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00158
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00063
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00032

Measured 2d ago against content hash 42987e2a8ffa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

researcher 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 2d 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.

.github/agents/researcher.agent.md · 40 lines

What it actually says

{
  "canonical_id": "researcher",
  "canonical_source": "agents/researcher.md",
  "git_tags": "forbidden",
  "host": "vscode_copilot",
  "instruction": "Read and follow the canonical agent source directly.",
  "interaction_requirement": "none",
  "invariant_ids": [
    "git-no-tags-v1"
  ],
  "kind": "flow_agent_adapter",
  "question_capability": {
    "bounds_enforcement": "unsupported",
    "choice_max": null,
    "choice_min": null,
    "custom_answer_behavior": "sequential_text_only",
    "disabled_choice_policy": "omit",
    "evidence": "No verified Flow-native VS Code Copilot question tool",
    "multi_select": false,
    "mutual_exclusion": false,
    "permission_check": "not_applicable",
    "sequential_fallback": true,
    "supported_modes": [],
    "tool": null,
    "transport": "sequential_text"
  },
  "tool_capability_requirements": [
    "file_read"
  ]
}
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. 2d ago First seen · 40 lines · 21 tokens per session scan A 42987e2a8ffa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

researcher is an agent published in the GitHub repository cofin/flow (15 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 21 tokens to every session and 316 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.