explorer

A command for exploring a knowledge vault and other sources to answer a topic through repeated search and evaluation. It breaks a question into smaller parts and stops when it judges that the topic is covered.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for research across an Obsidian vault, semantic-search servers, external repositories, or URLs, such as investigating a Kafka backup strategy.
Why use it?
A single search may miss important links or leave questions unanswered. This command continues exploring until the requested subject has enough coverage, within a set iteration limit.

Command

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 commands/bborbe/semantic-search/explorer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bborbe/semantic-search
Per session 21 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 767 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 $0.00021 $0.00767
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00383
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00153
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00077

Measured yesterday against content hash 41a3c47adcc7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

explorer 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 yesterday.

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.

commands/explorer.md · 58 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 58 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Usage

/semantic-search:explorer obsidian workflow
/semantic-search:explorer "kafka backup strategy" --max-iters=12
/semantic-search:explorer --server=personal raw schema cdb pipeline
/semantic-search:explorer claude code agents --workspace=~/explorer-runs/claude

When to use

  • /semantic-search:search — one-shot ranked list, no traversal
  • /semantic-search:research — multi-source synthesis from top-N hits, no link traversal, no external exploration
  • /semantic-search:explorer — goal-directed exploration with self-assessed stopping: planner first understands what the user is actually asking and decomposes it into concrete sub-questions, generator explores (vault pages, semantic searches, external repos/URLs), evaluator decides when each sub-question is answered

Process

1. Parse arguments

  • First non-flag string → <topic> (required; show usage and STOP if missing)
  • --server=<label> → scope semantic search to one MCP server (personal, work, (default)); omit to query all
  • --max-iters=<N> → hard cap on generator iterations (default 20)
  • --workspace=<dir> → explicit workspace path; default $HOME/.semantic-search-explorer/<topic-slug>-<unix-ts>/

2. Compute the workspace path

Default: ephemeral — agent creates via mktemp -d -t semantic-search-explorer (under $TMPDIR; OS cleans up). The synthesis is embedded in the caller report so nothing is lost when the workspace vanishes.

Pass --workspace=<dir> to preserve the workspace for inspection (debug "why did saturation fire on iter 4", inspect intermediate notes/, etc.).

3. Invoke the explorer-assistant agent

Task tool with:
  subagent_type: 'semantic-search:explorer-assistant'
  prompt: 'Explore topic <topic>. Workspace: <WORKSPACE>. Server scope: <server or "all">. Max iterations: <N>.'

The agent runs the Planner → Generator → Evaluator loop, writes synthesis to <WORKSPACE>/synthesis.md, and returns a short report.

4. Present the result

Read the full file on GitHub · 58 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. yesterday First seen · 58 lines · 21 tokens per session scan A 41a3c47adcc7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

explorer is a command published in the GitHub repository bborbe/semantic-search (2 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed BSD-2-Clause. It adds 21 tokens to every session and 767 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.