What is research-loop AGENTS.md?

Repository instructions for an AI coding agent working on research-loop, a Next.js application that runs AI-moderated interviews, analyzes sessions, and provides searchable transcripts with quoted source moments. They explain where important code lives and which interfaces must stay unchanged.

Use them when changing research-loop, particularly its moderator logic, transcript analysis, MCP server, or evaluation harness.

They help an agent understand the project before editing it and avoid breaking contracts used by the user interface and evaluation tests.

How JerryWhites/research-loop configures Codex and OpenCode

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to JerryWhites/research-loop. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JerryWhites/research-loop/main/AGENTS.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JerryWhites/research-loop

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/jerrywhites/research-loop/agents-md/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/jerrywhites/research-loop/agents-md)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/jerrywhites/research-loop/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/jerrywhites/research-loop/agents-md/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/jerrywhites/research-loop/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/jerrywhites/research-loop/agents-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 1,180 This file is loaded in full into every session.

When invoked 1,180 The same file — it is already loaded in full.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.01180	$0.01180
Opus 5.5	$0.00472	$0.00472
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00236	$0.00236
Haiku 4.5	$0.00118	$0.00118

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 8ac117772040, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research-loop 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 2mo 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 · 81 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 81 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

AGENTS.md

Guidance for AI agents (and people) working in this repo. The posting asked for code documented "for people and agents" — this is that file. Read the README for the product story; read this for the map and the contracts you must not break.

What this repo is

research-loop is a Next.js 15 (App Router) app that runs AI-moderated interviews, auto-analyzes each session into summary/chapters/highlights/tags, and serves a semantically searchable transcript repository whose answers cite the exact transcript moment — all also exposed as a 5-tool MCP server, plus an eval harness. One deployable artifact: UI + API + MCP.

Map — where things live, and the load-bearing contracts

lib/moderator/textLoop.ts — the shared moderator brain. moderatorStep, ModeratorState, initialModeratorState, and stepResponseSchema are a FROZEN contract: the eval harness (persona-bot ↔ moderator) and the text UI both call moderatorStep. Don't change its signature or the state shape without updating evals in lockstep.
lib/moderator/instructions.ts — buildInstructions(guide, { mode }), the single source of moderator behavior for both voice and text. Pure (no env/db) so it's unit-testable. The probing/neutrality/closing wording is asserted by tests.
lib/mcp/tools.ts — the single source of truth for MCP tool defs (names, descriptions, input schemas, handlers). The route (app/api/mcp/route.ts) and the tests both consume it; it imports no Next.js so tests can too.
lib/db/queries.ts — all DB access goes through here. Compose existing queries; don't reach into the client elsewhere. The DB is libSQL/SQLite.
lib/env.ts — lazy env rule: importing any module must never require a key. Only requireEnv() throws, and only when called. The token-free test suite depends on this; don't read keys at module top level.
lib/search/ — cosine (pure math), retrieve (searchRepository, brute-force cosine + optional rerank, participant-only by default), ask (askRepository + parseCitationMarkers — every claim must carry a [n]).
lib/analysis/analyze.ts — one structured Claude call → summary/chapters/ highlights/tags, then embeddings. Idempotent.

Read the full file on GitHub · 81 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.

2mo ago First seen · 81 lines · 1,180 tokens per session scan A 8ac117772040

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research-loop AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository JerryWhites/research-loop (0 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 1,180 tokens to every session, about $0.0047 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.

research-loop AGENTS.md next to 6 instructions from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
research-loop AGENTS.mdJerryWhites/research-loop	Instructions file	0	2mo ago	MIT	A	1,180	Codex, OpenCode
vscode buildNext.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	9,719	GitHub Copilot
next.js AGENTS.mdvercel/next.js	Instructions file	143k	yesterday	MIT	A	7,461	Codex, OpenCode
langchain AGENTS.mdlangchain-ai/langchain	Instructions file	149k	yesterday	MIT	A	4,680	Codex, OpenCode
vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	5,516	GitHub Copilot
vscode copilot-instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	3,093	GitHub Copilot
deepseek-harness AGENTS.mddeepseek-ai/deepseek-harness	Instructions file	274k	2d ago	MIT	A	4,313	Codex, OpenCode

research-loop: Instructions file for Codex