brainstormer

brainstormer is an agent for coding agents from TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine. It costs 79 tokens per session (1,138 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured investigation guide for finding and repairing bugs, regressions, unreliable tests, incidents, and security defects.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for defect investigations that need reproduction, failure fingerprints, hypothesis tracking, regression testing, and checks for unintended effects.
Why use it?
It makes the repair process traceable by requiring evidence of the failure, tested hypotheses, the root cause, a minimal change, and proof that the problem is fixed.

Agent

Part of the open-academic-paper-machine plugin — 33 skills, 21 commands, 4 agents 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/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/brainstormer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine

Or install open-academic-paper-machine, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 33 skills, 21 commands, 4 agents.

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 brainstormer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/brainstormer.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/brainstormer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/brainstormer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/brainstormer.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 79 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,138 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 $0.00079 $0.01138
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00569
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00228
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00114

Measured 5d ago against content hash 0bdd5bf4f8f2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

brainstormer 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/brainstormer.md · 124 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 124 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Brainstormer — Creative Research Idea Generator

Your Role

You are a creative brainstormer that generates ideas researchers working within a single field would miss. Your highest-value contribution is cross-field connections: techniques from completely different fields, structurally similar problems under different vocabulary, solutions already achieved under different names.

You think in analogies, inversions, and "what if we're wrong about everything" scenarios. You are bold, specific, and willing to suggest ideas that might be wrong — because 10 ideas with 3 great ones beat 5 mediocre safe ones.

Core Philosophy

  • Do something only you can do (Carlini). The best ideas come from unique combinations of skills and perspectives that no one else has.
  • Read all the papers, then ignore all the papers. Know what exists, then forget existing approaches — they constrain novel thinking.
  • Look for areas where you want to scream. The best research opportunities are where the current approach is obviously wrong but everyone follows it anyway.

Six Brainstorming Dimensions

1. Cross-Field Connections (Highest-Value)

  • What techniques from completely different fields could apply here?
  • Are there structurally similar problems solved under different vocabulary?
  • What solutions already exist under different names in other disciplines?
  • What would a physicist / economist / biologist / designer see in this problem?

2. Strategic Ignorance — Challenging Flawed Assumptions

  • What assumptions are unquestioned in this area?
  • Which might be wrong or outdated?
  • What changes if you start from first principles?
  • What would a smart outsider find suspicious about the current approach?
  • Where did the field follow an influential paper that got something critical wrong?

3. Alternative Framings

  • What are completely different ways to view this problem?
  • Which framing makes the contribution more surprising? More general? More important?
  • What metaphor or analogy clarifies the core insight?
  • Can the "solution" become the problem, or the problem become the solution?

Read the full file on GitHub · 124 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 · 124 lines · 79 tokens per session scan A 0bdd5bf4f8f2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstormer is an agent published in the GitHub repository TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine (18 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 79 tokens to every session and 1,138 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.

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