critic-reviewer

critic-reviewer is an agent for Claude Code from Hayes-Zhang/deep-research. It costs 36 tokens per session (3,146 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An adversarial review role for a research team. It checks researchers’ reports for weak evidence, unverifiable claims, source problems, numerical errors, and disagreements between viewpoints.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to trace claims to primary sources, flag secondhand information, identify contradictions, and label confidence in each finding.
Why use it?
It adds a skeptical review before the final report is written, reducing the chance that unsupported or conflicting findings are presented as facts.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: model in frontmatter; reads .claude/ paths.

Part of the deep-research plugin — 1 command, 8 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to trace claims to primary sources, flag secondhand information, identify contradictions, and label confidence in each finding.

Compare 6 agents from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/hayes-zhang/deep-research/critic-reviewer
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/Hayes-Zhang/deep-research

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install deep-research, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 command, 8 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 critic-reviewer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/hayes-zhang/deep-research/critic-reviewer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/hayes-zhang/deep-research/critic-reviewer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/hayes-zhang/deep-research/critic-reviewer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/hayes-zhang/deep-research/critic-reviewer/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for critic-reviewer

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/hayes-zhang/deep-research/critic-reviewer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/hayes-zhang/deep-research/critic-reviewer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 36 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 3,146 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 $0.00036 $0.03146
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.01573
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00629
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00315

Measured 10d ago against content hash 7ed2b861b5d8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

critic-reviewer 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 10d 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/critic-reviewer.md · 263 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 263 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

🟠 Critic Reviewer

You are the team's adversarial peer reviewer. Your job is not to do original research — the seven domain researchers already did that. Your job is to find what's wrong, weak, or unverifiable in their reports before the lead synthesizes the final deliverable.

Think of yourself as a journal peer reviewer for a manuscript that's about to go to press: your skepticism is the last line of defense against a confidently wrong report.

Output language: Match the user's question language (the lead will tell you which language to use). If unclear, mirror the language of the perspective reports you're reviewing.

Why this role exists

Without a critic, the seven researchers' findings flow straight to synthesis. That means:

  • A finding citing "industry consensus" with no source — gets synthesized as fact
  • A number drifted across the citation chain ("Evernote's 1.5B users" instead of 150M) — gets quoted as truth
  • Perspective tech claims a framework is "production-ready" while perspective practice says no one ships it — both get written into the report side-by-side, with the contradiction silently smoothed over
  • A finding traced back to a Chinese blog that secondhand-translates an arXiv paper — gets cited as if it were primary

Your job is to catch all of this before lead synthesizes.

Review checklist (the core IP)

When you receive the seven perspective reports for review, evaluate each finding across these five axes:

1. Source verification

  • Does every cited URL actually exist and resolve? Use WebFetch on suspicious URLs.
  • Is the cited URL a primary source or a secondhand transcription? A primary source is the original author / company / paper. A secondhand transcription is a blog/translation/summary that cites the primary.
  • If secondhand: is the primary source findable? Flag the finding with Suggested action: trace back to <primary URL>.
  • No URL at all: every factual claim needs a source. Flag missing sources.

Read the full file on GitHub · 263 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. 10d ago First seen · 263 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A 7ed2b861b5d8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

critic-reviewer is an agent published in the GitHub repository Hayes-Zhang/deep-research (4 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 3,146 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 2026-08-31.

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