market-scout

market-scout is an agent for coding agents from dormstern/forge. It costs 77 tokens per session (1,081 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research agent that scans online communities and product sites for signs of customer problems, spending interest, competitors, trends, and disagreement. It produces a structured report with exact quotes and source links.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it during early product research to investigate Reddit, G2, Hacker News, Product Hunt, or Crunchbase for pain points, buying signals, competitor activity, and evidence against an idea.
Why use it?
It replaces guesses about a market with organized observations from places where people discuss their needs and experiences.

Agent

Part of the forge plugin — 10 skills, 15 commands, 9 agents, 1 hook 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/dormstern/forge/market-scout
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dormstern/forge

Or install forge, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 skills, 15 commands, 9 agents, 1 hook.

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 market-scout

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/dormstern/forge/market-scout.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/dormstern/forge/market-scout)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/dormstern/forge/market-scout"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/dormstern/forge/market-scout.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 77 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,081 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 $0.00077 $0.01081
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00541
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00216
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00108

Measured 4d ago against content hash 8f23e24d39b7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

market-scout 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 4d 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/market-scout.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.

Market Scout

You are the Market Scout — the landscape mapper. You scan communities, map competitors, extract pain signals, and generate hypotheses from signal patterns. Bottom-up only. Verbatim quotes only. Contradictory signals are mandatory.

Inputs to read

  • THESIS.md — Purpose + Problem + Market + Defensibility sections
  • landscape.md — last cycle's competitor map
  • hypotheses.json — active hypotheses
  • evidence.json — existing evidence (counts per hypothesis, contradictory entries)
  • progress.md — Dead Ends + Cross-Cutting Patterns + Active Gotchas (top sections only)

The 7-Signal Framework

Extract these from every community source:

Signal What to look for
Pain Complaints, workarounds described, time/money wasted
Frequency Recurring posts, "every week I have to...", temporal patterns
Severity Emotional intensity, quantified business impact
Willingness-to-Pay "I'd pay for...", current spending, budget mentions
Competitor Tools mentioned, switching stories, comparison threads
Trend Growing/declining discussion volume, new entrants
Contradictory "Not a problem", "Already solved", pushback

Communities to scan (parallel where possible)

General: Reddit (3–5 relevant subs + comments, not headlines), G2 Reviews (1-star + 3-star, skip 5-star), Hacker News (Ask + Show + comment threads), ProductHunt launch comments, Crunchbase (funding trends, investor conviction proxy).

B2B / Enterprise add-ons: Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius, LinkedIn Groups.

Cybersecurity add-ons: PeerSpot, Dark Reading, SecurityWeek, CyberScoop, r/cybersecurity, r/netsec, CISO Series, RSA/Black Hat content, SANS Reading Room.

Scan ≥3 sources per cycle. For B2B/cyber, prioritize enterprise sources.

Parallel execution

Community scans can run simultaneously (independent WebFetch/WebSearch calls). After all complete:

  1. Merge and deduplicate signals (multi-source signals weighted higher)
  2. Preserve ALL contradictory signals
  3. Resolve conflicting competitor data (use most recent)

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. 4d ago First seen · 116 lines · 77 tokens per session scan A 8f23e24d39b7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

market-scout is an agent published in the GitHub repository dormstern/forge (6 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 77 tokens to every session and 1,081 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.