paper-pilot AGENTS.md

paper-pilot AGENTS.md is an instructions file for Codex, OpenCode from aytzey/paper-pilot. It costs 1,073 tokens per session, scanned A, original, MIT.

Project guidance for Paper Pilot, an MCP server and command-line tool for finding academic papers, opening accessible PDFs, extracting their text, and building citation graphs. It also supports paper reading and Zotero, a reference-management service.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for literature searches, full-text paper analysis, PDF charts and tables, related-paper graphs, citation reports, and Zotero synchronization.
Why use it?
It gives research agents a defined order for discovering sources, reading evidence, inspecting figures, and managing citations.

Instructions file for CodexOpenCode

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 instructions/aytzey/paper-pilot/agents-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aytzey/paper-pilot

Made for: Codex, OpenCode.

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-pilot AGENTS.md

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/aytzey/paper-pilot/agents-md.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/aytzey/paper-pilot/agents-md)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/aytzey/paper-pilot/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/aytzey/paper-pilot/agents-md.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 1,073 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 1,073 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
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 $0.01073 $0.01073
Opus 5 $0.00536 $0.00536
Sonnet 5 $0.00215 $0.00215
Haiku 4.5 $0.00107 $0.00107

Measured 5d ago against content hash 4053089bf388, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

paper-pilot AGENTS.md 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.md · 107 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 107 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

AGENTS.md

This file is the shared entry point for any coding or research agent working with paper-pilot.

What This Repository Does

This project exposes an MCP server for:

  • academic search across 6 databases (Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, arXiv, Crossref, Europe PMC, DOAJ)
  • open-access PDF resolution and inspection
  • Sci-Hub paper resolution and download (opt-in, disabled by default)
  • deep reading with full-text extraction and chunking
  • PDF page rendering for charts, tables, and figures
  • interactive citation/relatedness graph export (HTML)
  • Zotero sync in both local and web modes

There is also a zero-config CLI: paper-pilot demo "<topic>" runs the whole pipeline and opens a citation graph without any MCP client.

Read Order

If you need context fast, read files in this order:

  1. README.md
  2. docs/ARCHITECTURE.md
  3. src/paper_pilot/server.py
  4. src/paper_pilot/services/zotero.py
  5. CLAUDE.md or CODEX.md, depending on the client

For most research tasks, use tools in this order:

  1. healthcheck
  2. research_topic for broad discovery and report generation
  3. deep_read_topic when you need evidence chunks and local PDF access
  4. render_pdf_pages when visual inspection matters (returns the pages as images you can see)
  5. read_pdf_document to get a downloaded PDF's local path + resource link (pass embed_base64=true only if your client reads inlined PDFs)
  6. get_pdf_page_text to pull the exact text of specific pages (a reference, a table) when you cannot read the file from disk
  7. graph_topic (or write_graph=True) when a citation/relatedness map helps
  8. list_zotero_collections before writing into an existing collection

Use search_literature and find_similar_papers when you want fine-grained control instead of the bundled pipeline.

Important Output Locations

The server writes artifacts under data/:

Read the full file on GitHub · 107 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 · 107 lines · 1,073 tokens per session scan A 4053089bf388

Subscribe to this mod's changes

paper-pilot AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository aytzey/paper-pilot (12 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 1,073 tokens to every session, about $0.0054 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.