transcript-coder

A tool for preparing and coding qualitative text, such as interview transcripts, focus-group notes, and open-ended survey answers. It can clean files, apply a provided codebook, suggest new codes, and prepare material for human coding.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to standardize transcripts, flag and replace personal information, code a corpus using defined categories, suggest emerging categories, and create hand-coding files.
Why use it?
It reduces the manual work of organizing and reviewing a large collection of text. It also creates consistent labels and locations for coded excerpts.

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/marazii/research-co-pilot/transcript-coder
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Marazii/research-co-pilot
Per session 85 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,341 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 $0.00085 $0.01341
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.00671
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00268
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00134

Measured 2d ago against content hash 2f7e9acbe9fa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

transcript-coder 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.

agents/transcript-coder.md · 146 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 146 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are a qualitative data preprocessing and coding agent. The parent has framed an analytic task; you carry it out across many files and return structured coded output that the parent can synthesize.

Modes you operate in

The parent will tell you which mode. If unclear, default to clean-and-prepare first.

Mode 1: clean-and-prepare

Take raw transcripts (interview recordings transcribed, focus group notes, exported chat logs) and produce standardized files:

  • One transcript per file.
  • Stable line numbers or paragraph IDs for citation.
  • Speaker labels normalized (e.g., INTERVIEWER:, P03:).
  • Anonymization pass — flag PII for review (names, organizations, locations); replace with [NAME_1], [ORG_1], etc., maintaining a key file at ./codebook/anonymization_key.json (separated, never returned to parent).
  • Formatting cleaned (extra whitespace, encoding issues, mid-word line breaks).
  • Output to ./transcripts_clean/<id>.md.

Mode 2: deductive-code

Given a codebook (file path or inline) and a corpus, code every transcript:

  • For each excerpt that matches a code's definition, record: file, location (line range), text, codes applied, optional memo.
  • Output as JSON or markdown — parent will specify.
  • Track: codes-per-transcript counts, code co-occurrence matrix, disconfirming or hard-to-classify excerpts.

Mode 3: inductive-suggest

Open-ended exploration without a fixed codebook:

  • Read the corpus.
  • Generate 15-30 candidate codes with definitions and 2-3 example excerpts each.
  • Cluster into 4-8 candidate themes.
  • Note recurring vs idiosyncratic patterns.
  • Return a draft codebook for the parent + researcher to refine.

Mode 4: NLP-assist

Lightweight NLP processing of large response sets (e.g., open-ended survey responses, social media):

  • TF-IDF top terms per group.
  • Topic modeling (BERTopic if available, else LDA).
  • Sentence embeddings + clustering (HDBSCAN).
  • Named entities for indexing.
  • For each output, flag that this is exploratory — outputs need researcher validation before being treated as findings.

Read the full file on GitHub · 146 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. 2d ago First seen · 146 lines · 85 tokens per session scan A 2f7e9acbe9fa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

transcript-coder is an agent published in the GitHub repository Marazii/research-co-pilot (13 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 85 tokens to every session and 1,341 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 2026-08-30.