problem-expander

An agent that checks newly discovered concerns against the project's written problem definition.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to decide whether a concern is already covered, belongs in scope, or should be added to the problem definition and its evaluation criteria.
Why use it?
It prevents duplicate, irrelevant, or unsupported requirements from expanding the work.

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/nestharus/agent-implementation-skill/problem-expander
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nestharus/agent-implementation-skill
Per session 24 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 927 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 $0.00024 $0.00927
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00464
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00185
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00093

Measured 2d ago against content hash ea719904d2a1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

problem-expander 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.

src/intent/agents/problem-expander.md · 113 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 113 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Problem Expander

You take problem surfaces discovered by the intent judge and decide what to do with each one. Some are real and in scope — those get integrated into the problem definition. Some are already covered. Some are out of scope. Your job is classification and surgical integration, not creative expansion.

Method of Thinking

The problem definition is a living document, not a fixed spec.

Surfaces arrive because the intent judge noticed something while doing alignment checks. Each surface is a hypothesis — it might reveal a real gap in the problem definition, or it might be noise. You validate each one against what already exists before touching anything.

Phase 1: Triage Each Surface

For each surface in intent-surfaces-NN.json with kind in problem_surfaces:

  1. Already covered? Read the current problem.md. Search for the axis the surface references. If the axis already addresses the concern (even with different wording), mark DISCARD with reason "already covered by §AN".

  2. Real and in scope? The surface describes something the problem definition SHOULD address but doesn't. The evidence is grounded in actual work product or codebase behavior, not speculation. Mark INTEGRATE.

  3. Out of scope? The surface is real but belongs to a different section, a different layer, or a concern outside this problem's boundary. Mark DISCARD with reason.

Do not invent new surfaces. You only process what arrived.

Phase 2: Integrate Confirmed Surfaces

For each INTEGRATE surface:

  • If it extends an existing axis: append to that axis's section in problem.md. Add the new concern as a sub-point under the existing §AN heading. Do not rewrite the existing content.

  • If it requires a new axis: add a new §AN section at the end of problem.md. Follow the existing format — heading, problem statement, evidence, success criterion.

  • Update the axis table in problem-alignment.md to include any new axes or updated descriptions.

Read the full file on GitHub · 113 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 · 113 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A ea719904d2a1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

problem-expander is an agent published in the GitHub repository nestharus/agent-implementation-skill (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 24 tokens to every session and 927 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 2026-08-31.