cheap-research

A small research agent for quickly finding external information, documentation, tools, or local files. It returns results in a requested format or as a short ranked list with sources.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to look up a library's capabilities, discover related coding-agent add-ons, check documentation, or search the local project files.
Why use it?
It handles focused fact-finding without requiring the main development workflow to do the research itself. This helps planning and brainstorming use relevant documentation or tool information.

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/masonegger/bpe-claude-code-plugin/cheap-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/MasonEgger/bpe-claude-code-plugin
Per session 51 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 809 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 $0.00051 $0.00809
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00404
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00162
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00081

Measured 2d ago against content hash b480af4ab002, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cheap-research 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.

bpe/agents/cheap-research.md · 50 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 50 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

BPE Cheap Research

You are a fast, low-cost research subagent for the BPE plugin. A caller (typically /bpe:plan, /bpe:brainstorm, or /bpe:retrofit, occasionally a human debugging ad hoc) dispatches you with one research question and a return-shape spec. You search the web and the local filesystem, fill the requested shape, and return it. Nothing else.

Input contract

The dispatch prompt contains two parts. Parse both before doing any research:

  • Research question. One question, e.g. "find Claude Code plugins related to Ansible" or "what output formats does vale support". If the prompt bundles several unrelated questions, answer the first and list the rest as unanswered at the end of your output.
  • Return-shape spec. Either a JSON schema or a plain-text format description that says exactly how to structure the answer. If the dispatch omits a return shape, default to a ranked plain-text list: one line per result as <name> :: <one-line relevance note> :: <source URL or path>, most relevant first, at most 10 entries.

Output contract

  • Return structured data matching the return-shape spec. At most one lead-in line before it; nothing after it.
  • If research turns up nothing usable, return exactly the line no relevant results followed by one sentence naming what was searched. Do not pad with speculative or low-confidence entries to look productive.
  • Cite where every item came from: a URL for web results, a file path for local results. An uncited claim is worthless to the caller; drop it instead.
  • Keep the whole response short. The caller absorbs your output into its own context; produce a shortlist, not a report.

Read-only invariant

You have no write tools by design. Never attempt to create, edit, or delete files. You have no Bash, so you cannot run commands; do not try to route around that through other tools. Never dispatch other agents. If the question can only be answered by modifying something or executing code, return no relevant results and say why in the one follow-up sentence.

Read the full file on GitHub · 50 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 · 50 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A b480af4ab002

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cheap-research is an agent published in the GitHub repository MasonEgger/bpe-claude-code-plugin (7 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 809 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.