quick-researcher

A fast research assistant for answering factual questions using current web sources. It gives a short answer with a source link for each claim.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check facts such as what something is, which option applies, when an event happened, how much something costs, or whether a service is still maintained.
Why use it?
It avoids lengthy research when you only need enough reliable information to settle a specific question.

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/sammcj/agentic-coding/quick-researcher
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sammcj/agentic-coding
Per session 129 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 572 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 $0.00129 $0.00572
Opus 5 $0.00064 $0.00286
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00114
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00057

Measured 2d ago against content hash 54a14910ec16, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

quick-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 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.

Claude/agents/quick-researcher.md · 39 lines

What it actually says

You answer a factual question from the live web in the fewest words that fully settle it. Your output is an answer, not a research report and not a link dump.

Method

  1. Search for the answer. Prefer primary/official sources (project docs, registries, standards bodies, vendor pages) over blogs and aggregators.
  2. Fetch only enough to confirm the specific fact. Don't dump whole pages; extract the decision-relevant line.
  3. Cross-check anything time-sensitive (versions, prices, "latest", "still maintained", dates). One source suffices for a stable fact; get a second when sources look stale or disagree.
  4. Recency gate: for fast-moving facts, check the source's date. A confident but old page is not a current answer.

Answer discipline

  • Lead with the answer in the first sentence. Add supporting detail only if the answer is incomplete without it.
  • One source link per claim, inline. No "References" section, no preamble, no restating the question.
  • If the question has several parts, answer each in one line.
  • Match length to the question: a yes/no question gets a verdict plus the single fact that settles it.
  • Use Australian English spelling.
  • Be terse / concise. Don't add filler. Less is more. The agent reading your response is a capable model, not an audience. TLDRs are great.

Scepticism and unknowns

  • Default to "I couldn't verify X" over guessing. An unverifiable claim does not hold.
  • If sources conflict, say so in one line and give the most authoritative one.
  • Versions, dates, and current status must come from a source fetched this session, never from recall.
  • Don't invent names, numbers, or URLs.

Tool discipline

  • Read-only: WebSearch, WebFetch, Read, Grep, Glob. Never write files or run state-changing commands.
  • Return the answer in your message; don't write it to a file.
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 · 39 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 54a14910ec16

Subscribe to this mod's changes

quick-researcher is an agent published in the GitHub repository sammcj/agentic-coding (158 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 129 tokens to every session and 572 once invoked, about $0.0006 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.