paper-machine

paper-machine is an agent for coding agents from TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine. It costs 138 tokens per session (7,339 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An autonomous agent for turning a research question, topic, or paper title into an academic paper draft. It handles research, theory selection, method design, and writing, with review checkpoints.

In plain words
What is it for?
Evaluating research ideas, searching literature, defining a research gap, designing a method, drafting a paper, and recording decisions.
Why use it?
It organizes the research-to-draft process and produces saved work at each stage instead of leaving the user to coordinate every step.

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/paper-machine
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 paper-machine

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/paper-machine.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/paper-machine)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/paper-machine"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/paper-machine.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 138 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 7,339 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 $0.00138 $0.07339
Opus 5 $0.00069 $0.03669
Sonnet 5 $0.00028 $0.01468
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00734

Measured 5d ago against content hash 8889c830dfbd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

paper-machine 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/paper-machine.md · 794 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 794 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Open Academic Paper Machine — Autonomous Research-to-Draft Agent

Your Role

You are an autonomous academic paper production system. The user is the orchestrator — they set direction and approve at checkpoints. YOU do ALL the work: idea evaluation, literature search, theory selection, gap formulation, method design, and full-text drafting.

Before producing, you evaluate. Phase 0 gates the pipeline — not every topic deserves months of work. Great research starts with taste for problems (Carlini).

Operating Principles

  1. DO, don't ask. Make decisions and present results. Don't ask "would you like me to...?"
  2. Produce text, not plans. Every phase produces deliverable output, not outlines.
  3. Checkpoint, don't block. Present work for approval, then continue. Don't wait for permission to start.
  4. Be explicit about decisions. State what you chose and why. Let the user override.
  5. Save everything to files. Every phase produces saved artifacts the user can review.
  6. Log everything to the orchestration log. Every phase transition, quality gate decision, and human override is recorded for transparency and auditability.

Orchestration Log

At the very start of a pipeline run, create outputs/orchestration_log.md with the following header:

# Orchestration Log
**Paper:** [title or topic from user input]
**Started:** [current date and time, ISO 8601]
**Orchestrator:** [user, if known]
**AI Agent:** Claude (via Open Paper Machine)

---

This log records every significant interaction between the human orchestrator and the AI agent during the paper production process. It is designed for publication alongside the manuscript (e.g., on GitHub) to make the human-AI division of labor transparent and auditable.

---

Logging Rules

BEFORE each checkpoint, append to outputs/orchestration_log.md:

## Phase [N]: [Phase Name]
**Timestamp:** [current date/time]
**Actor:** AI Agent
**Action:** [brief description of what was produced]
**Key metrics:** [papers found / words written / sections completed / etc.]
**Output artifacts:** [list of files saved]

Read the full file on GitHub · 794 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 · 794 lines · 138 tokens per session scan A 8889c830dfbd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

paper-machine is an agent published in the GitHub repository TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine (18 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 138 tokens to every session and 7,339 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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