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.
npx agentmods add instructions/synectic-research/research-scan/agents-mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Synectic-Research/research-scanWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/synectic-research/research-scan/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/synectic-research/research-scan/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/synectic-research/research-scan/agents-md.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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 | $0.10844 | $0.10844 |
| Opus 5 | $0.05422 | $0.05422 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.02169 | $0.02169 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.01084 | $0.01084 |
Grade A, and why
research-scan AGENTS.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 4d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 559 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
AGENTS.md — research-scan
Operating doctrine for this repo. Spec of record: research-scan-v1-spec.md — read the relevant
section before changing behaviour it defines. Section references below (§9, §10.4) are to it.
Vocabulary
- run — one scan. A directory
research/scans/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<slug>/holding every stage's file, relative to the process's cwd: the repo for a local scan,$RESEARCH_SCAN_MCP_DATA/<scan_id>/for one driven through the MCP adapter. - cid — stable candidate id: first 12 hex of sha1 of the primary identifier, in the priority
order doi > arxiv > pmid >
norm(title)+year(§8.2). The join key across every file. - origin — one discovery path that found a candidate (
query,references,citations,recommendations). A paper keeps every origin it earns; origin count is a ranking signal. - in-window / outside-window — inside the publication window, or an expansion reference from
before it. Out-of-window papers are tagged, never dropped, and fill the
foundationalslots. - [A] stage / [C] stage — a stage the agent performs under a rubric, versus one the CLI performs
deterministically.
plan,screen,rerankare [A]; everything else is [C]. - verified / flagged — a packet whose DOI resolved and whose title, year and first author match
the live record, versus one kept with
mismatches[]and an[UNVERIFIED]marker. Never silent. - purpose —
build | research | orient, declared on the brief'sPurpose:line or inferred by the planner and written into the first sentence ofbrief_summary. Decides what counts as impact: whichsub_criteriaset is derived, whatwhy_it_mattersmust argue, what screening rewards, and how the judge reads relevance. Not a schema field — it lives in prose, on purpose. - profile —
quick | standard | deep, chosen atinitand recorded inmanifest.defaults. Sets per-query depth, the pool cap, the out-of-window total for the run, and whether the gap round runs. Flags still override it. - gap round — V1.1's one extra retrieval round, aimed by
coverage.jsonat the sub-criteria round 1 covered thinnest.queries.json.round2holds its queries,rNN/xrNNits batches. It runs exactly once; "round 1 / round 2" already means the screening passes, hence the name. - slice — S0…S6 in §15. One slice = one commit = one demoable gate.
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.
- 4d ago First seen · 559 lines · 10,844 tokens per session scan A 98146f905d18
research-scan AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository Synectic-Research/research-scan (0 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 10,844 tokens to every session, about $0.0542 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.
Other instructions, from other repositories
vscode buildNext.instructions.md
Working notes and architecture documentation for the new esbuild-based build system in build/next. Use when making changes to the new build pipeline (transpile/bundle commands, NLS plugin, source-map handling, resource copying, or self-hosting watch tasks).
spec-kit AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md instructions for github/spec-kit, covering agents.md, about spec kit and specify, quickstart — add a new integration in 5 steps, integration architecture and integrationmanifest — file tracking.
codex AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md instructions for openai/codex, covering rust/codex-rs, the codex-core crate, code review rules, crate api surface and model visible context.
langchain AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md instructions for langchain-ai/langchain, covering global development guidelines for the langchain monorepo, corridor security analysis, project architecture and context, monorepo structure and development tools & commands.
vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.md
Instructions for microsoft/vscode, covering vs code oss third-party-notices pipeline, architecture, pipeline flow in ci, applying the notice (cutover) and fallback chain (never fail the build).
next.js AGENTS.md
Instructions for vercel/next.js, covering next.js development guide, codebase structure, monorepo overview, core package: packages/next and other important packages.