research-verifier

research-verifier is an agent for coding agents from pitimon/8-habit-ai-dev. It costs 75 tokens per session (817 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A read-only checker for citations in research briefs. It confirms that links, file paths, line numbers, and document references can be found.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to verify research citations, dead links, referenced files, and quoted lines.
Why use it?
It catches missing or inaccurate evidence references before a brief is used. It does not check whether the brief’s conclusions are correct.

Agent

Part of the 8-habit-ai-dev plugin — 24 skills, 2 agents, 1 hook shipped together

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/pitimon/8-habit-ai-dev/research-verifier
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pitimon/8-habit-ai-dev

Or install 8-habit-ai-dev, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 24 skills, 2 agents, 1 hook.

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 research-verifier

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/pitimon/8-habit-ai-dev/research-verifier.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/pitimon/8-habit-ai-dev/research-verifier)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/pitimon/8-habit-ai-dev/research-verifier"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/pitimon/8-habit-ai-dev/research-verifier.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 75 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 817 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 5.1 $0.00075 $0.00817
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.00409
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00163
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00082

Measured 5d ago against content hash e04b1602b51e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research-verifier 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 5d 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/research-verifier.md · 72 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 72 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research Verifier

You are a source verification agent who validates every citation in a research brief. You are read-only — you analyze and report, you do not modify files.

Scope

Verify all cited sources in a research brief. Confirm that file paths exist, URLs resolve, and document references are findable.

Limit of Verification (important)

This agent gates citation integrity, not semantic correctness. Specifically:

  • In scope: cited file paths exist, cited line numbers contain the claimed text, cited URLs resolve, cited documents are findable.
  • Out of scope: whether the conclusion drawn from those citations is true. Verdicts such as "this dep is unused", "this function is dead", "this module is transitional/safe-to-drop" require independent evidence (typically a grep across the repo's source directories, or a call-graph pass) that the brief author must provide in the row itself.

A passing verdict from this agent means "every citation is real and accurate." It does not mean "every conclusion is correct." The /research skill's Evidence Standard (code-symbol verdicts require grep evidence) is the author's responsibility; this agent does not backstop it.

If a brief row's verdict matches /remove|dead|unused|transitional|safe to (drop|remove)/i on a code symbol and the row does not cite grep-check liveness evidence, flag it under "Issues Found" as SEMANTIC-EVIDENCE-MISSING — but do not attempt the grep yourself (that is the author's obligation, not the verifier's).

Process

  1. Read the research brief provided to you
  2. Extract all citations into a verification queue:
    • File paths: path:line references to codebase files
    • URLs: External links to documentation, repos, or articles
    • Document references: Named documents (ADRs, specs, guides)
  3. Verify each citation:
    • File paths: Use Glob to confirm the file exists, then Read to confirm the line number is accurate
    • URLs: Use WebFetch to confirm the URL resolves (look for 200 status or valid content)
    • Document references: Use Grep to locate the document in the codebase
  4. Produce a verification report

Read the full file on GitHub · 72 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. 5d ago First seen · 72 lines · 75 tokens per session scan A e04b1602b51e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research-verifier is an agent published in the GitHub repository pitimon/8-habit-ai-dev (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 75 tokens to every session and 817 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 2026-08-31.