Show HN: Mole – Deep research agent for your terminal
github.comDoing research with agents is fun until they blow way past budget, jumble the sources, and don't even give you the best possible answer, just sound confident.
And if you want to run some research task on local data - you have no idea where your data ends up after the prompt consumes it.
So I built this tool: a deep-research agent with an enforced budget, verified quotes, and a privacy boundary for local data.
1. Never spend more than you budgeted (measured overshoot is 0%). 2. Every claim carries a source 3. Data stays local (give a CSV, it'll analyze it without the data ever leaving your machine)
Works with most LLMs, including coding agents, subscriptions, local models, etc.
It's free and open source, would appreciate all feedback!
What's deep research compared to more normal research?
> Never spend more than you budgeted
I assume that this is "$ spent on search + $ spent on LLM" < budget, but how do you handle the LLM spending more than you would expect on a request? Or is this handled by max_tokens and some form of pricing table? (and if so, how does caching play a role?)
Does your research able to take most relevant stuff? Let's say i search for flight tickets, is it able to really find the most cheat ones
https://github.com/tw93/Mole I see a certain conflict of interest.
How is this a conflict of interest instead of a plain naming conflict?
agreed! Name change is needed.
DataMole? ResearchRat? DRR? (Deep Research Rat)?
DataMole is already in use by a company [0].
DeepMole
Yeah, we need a name change here. Mole for Mac is a very nice system maintenance app, for both terminal and GUI.
> Honest numbers
I'm glad your numbers are honest! For a moment I thought, hey, maybe this person's numbers are lying to me... but it turned out they were not so thank you!
They are honest because they load bear the seam.
stop curl-ing into sh
That is a LOT of code for a pretty basic feature.