Run one autoresearch cycle — hypothesize, Director review, execute on Modal, evaluate. Use to manually trigger a research cycle or to test the loop.
Run one cycle of the autoresearch loop. Can be run manually or by the simple-loop conductor.
/research-cycle or /research-cycle scout — full cycle, Scout tier (<$2)/research-cycle confirm — full cycle, Confirm tier ($2-10)/research-cycle dry-run — hypothesis + Director review only, no Modal executionRead .loop/state/budget.json. If daily or weekly limit would be exceeded, report and stop.
Spawn an Explore agent with the hypothesis agent prompt (.loop/agents/hypothesis.md). It reads program.md and recent cards, returns a structured hypothesis + draft run card.
Spawn an Explore agent with the research-director prompt (.loop/agents/research-director.md). Pass it the hypothesis. It returns APPROVE / REVISE / REJECT with reasoning.
Present the hypothesis AND the Director's review to the user. If dry-run mode, stop here.
If REJECT: log to RESEARCH-LOG.md. Done.
Ask the user for confirmation before spending money: "Director approved [experiment]. Estimated cost: $X. Launch on Modal?"
If confirmed:
modal run --detach/experiment-complete when the run finishes..loop/state/log.jsonl.loop/state/budget.json