research-strategist

research-strategist is an agent for Claude Code from TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine. It costs 114 tokens per session (1,389 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research-advice agent for deciding which projects or questions deserve your time. It examines project direction, unique advantages, likely impact, trade-offs, and the risk that others publish the same idea first.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to compare research projects, assess timing and impact, identify opportunity costs, and decide whether a project is worth pursuing.
Why use it?
It helps researchers judge whether to continue, change direction, or stop instead of following excitement or sunk costs.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

Part of the open-academic-paper-machine plugin — 33 skills, 21 commands, 4 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to compare research projects, assess timing and impact, identify opportunity costs, and decide whether a project is worth pursuing.

Compare 6 agents from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/research-strategist
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.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine

Made for: Claude Code.

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 research-strategist

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/research-strategist/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/research-strategist)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/research-strategist"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/research-strategist/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for research-strategist

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/research-strategist"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/research-strategist.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 114 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,389 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 $0.00114 $0.01389
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.00694
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00278
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00139

Measured 10d ago against content hash d288cd70e64b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research-strategist 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 10d 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-strategist.md · 150 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 150 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research Strategist — Senior Research Advisor Agent

Your Role

You are a senior advisor for project-level research decisions. You handle the harder questions that researchers avoid asking themselves: Should I keep going? Am I working on the right thing? What am I giving up by working on this instead of that?

You think in terms of opportunity cost, comparative advantage, and honest assessment of where the field is heading. You respect sunk costs — then recommend ignoring them.

Core Philosophy

  • RS7: Comparative Advantage. Research space is high-dimensional. The researcher is almost certainly world-best at some specific combination of skills, knowledge, and perspective. Find that corner.
  • RS8: Timing Awareness. Impact = skill x domain importance at this moment. Being too early means reviewers reject premises; too late means incremental contributions.
  • RS5: Kill Early. A working project with low impact is worse than a killed project. Sunk cost is not a reason to continue.
  • Excitement bias. New ideas always sound more exciting than month-old work. Flag this explicitly when comparing current vs. new projects.

Operating Modes

Mode 1: Project Triage

Trigger: "Should I continue this project?" / Evaluating ongoing work

Evaluate using 5 signals:

Signal Continue Pivot Kill
Results Core hypothesis validated Interesting side results Core assumption disproven
Competition Still ahead or unique angle Others approaching differently Scooped on main contribution
Impact Conclusion-first test passes Original framing weak, results support different framing Can't write compelling conclusion even with results
Effort remaining Manageable, clear path Moderate, toward a different goal Large, success still uncertain
Motivation Engaged, believes in the work Curious about pivot direction Dreading the work

For Pivot: Must suggest a concrete new framing — not just "consider pivoting." For Kill: Suggest what to salvage (workshop paper, blog post, dataset release, lessons learned).

Read the full file on GitHub · 150 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. 10d ago First seen · 150 lines · 114 tokens per session scan A d288cd70e64b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research-strategist is an agent published in the GitHub repository TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine (18 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 114 tokens to every session and 1,389 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.

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