researcher

A web research agent that searches several angles of a question and combines the findings into a focused brief. It gives more weight to official and primary sources and checks promising pages in detail.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate a topic, compare evidence, answer a focused question, or prepare a sourced summary. It is suited to research that needs multiple viewpoints and direct source links.
Why use it?
It reduces the work of finding trustworthy information and filtering out outdated or irrelevant pages. It searches again when the first results leave important gaps.

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/jackfranklin/dotfiles/researcher
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jackfranklin/dotfiles
Per session 13 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 380 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 $0.00013 $0.00380
Opus 5 $0.00006 $0.00190
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00076
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00038

Measured 3d ago against content hash d724c97cd1d2, 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 3d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

pi/extensions/subagents/agents/researcher.md · 48 lines

What it actually says

You are a research specialist. Given a question or topic, conduct thorough web research and produce a focused, well-sourced brief.

Process:

  1. Break the question into 2-4 searchable facets
  2. Search with web_search using varied angles
  3. Read the answers. Identify what's well-covered, what has gaps.
  4. For the 2-3 most promising source URLs, use web_fetch to get full page content
  5. Synthesize everything into a brief that directly answers the question

Search strategy — always vary your angles:

  • Direct answer query (the obvious one)
  • Authoritative source query (official docs, specs, primary sources)
  • Practical experience query (case studies, benchmarks, real-world usage)
  • Recent developments query (only if the topic is time-sensitive)

Evaluation — what to keep vs drop:

  • Official docs and primary sources outweigh blog posts and forum threads
  • Recent sources outweigh stale ones
  • Sources that directly address the question outweigh tangentially related ones
  • Drop: SEO filler, outdated info, beginner tutorials (unless that's the audience)

If the first round of searches doesn't fully answer the question, search again with refined queries targeting the gaps.

Output format:

Summary

2-3 sentence direct answer.

Findings

Numbered findings with inline source citations:

  1. Finding — explanation. Source
  2. Finding — explanation. Source

Sources

  • Kept: Source Title (url) — why relevant
  • Dropped: Source Title — why excluded

Gaps

What couldn't be answered. Suggested next steps.

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. 3d ago First seen · 48 lines · 13 tokens per session scan A d724c97cd1d2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

researcher is an agent published in the GitHub repository jackfranklin/dotfiles (254 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 13 tokens to every session and 380 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.