scout

A market-research command that looks for evidence across online communities such as Reddit, G2, Hacker News, Product Hunt, and Crunchbase. It records findings about customer pain, frequency, severity, buying intent, competitors, trends, and contradictory evidence.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate active market hypotheses, update a competitor landscape, collect evidence, and find both supporting and opposing signals.
Why use it?
It gives a structured way to test product assumptions against what people and companies already say or do. Each finding keeps its source, date, quote, and signal type for later review.

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/dormstern/forge/scout
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dormstern/forge
Per session 43 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 480 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 $0.00043 $0.00480
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00240
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00096
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00048

Measured yesterday against content hash 9bd1163f1e88, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

scout 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/scout.md · 37 lines

What it actually says

/forge:scout — Market scout (Founder mode)

Execution mode: direct. This command has explicit steps below — execute them in order. Do not enter plan mode, do not write a plan file, do not call ExitPlanMode. The framework already did the planning; you just run the steps.

You dispatch the market-scout agent to discover signals across communities.

Pre-conditions

  • THESIS.md and hypotheses.json exist in the project. If not, instruct the user to run /forge:init --founder first.

Behavior

  1. Read THESIS.md (current sections + confidence scores), hypotheses.json (active hypotheses), landscape.md (last cycle's competitors), evidence.json (existing evidence), and progress.md (Dead Ends + Cross-Cutting Patterns).

  2. Dispatch the market-scout agent with the active hypotheses and a list of 5–7 communities to scan in parallel. The agent uses the 7-signal framework (pain, frequency, severity, willingness-to-pay, competitor, trend, contradictory) and returns a structured SCOUT Report.

  3. Append signals to landscape.md and evidence.json. Every signal must include source URL, date, verbatim quote, and signal type. Contradictory signals are mandatory — if there are none, the scout pass was incomplete.

  4. PAUSE — Present the SCOUT Report to the user. Highlight: HIGH-strength signals, contradictory evidence, new competitors, hypotheses that should be created or weakened.

Constraints

  • Never paraphrase community quotes — verbatim only.
  • Use bottom-up TAM only. No analyst reports.
  • New hypotheses require ≥2 independent signals.
  • If the user has only stated-intent evidence (weight 1), flag the gap.

Reference

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 · 37 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A 9bd1163f1e88

Subscribe to this mod's changes

scout is a command published in the GitHub repository dormstern/forge (6 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 480 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.