Agon

Claude Code plugin for autonomous AI research — from a bare topic to running experiments, with no human-written experimental code

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Agon (paper) is an automated research system built around Prompt Economy: treat prompt engineering as engineering and minimize the engineering effort required from humans. It keeps the workflow minimal and explicit: topic -> idea -> proposal -> experiment.

Agon has been used across more than ten research domains; see the paper for deployment details.

Quick start

Clone Agon and agon-artifacts:

git clone https://github.com/AutoResearch-Factory/Agon.git
git clone https://github.com/AutoResearch-Factory/agon-artifacts.git

Put the two directories side by side:

.
├── Agon/
└── agon-artifacts/

Then run Claude Code from the artifacts repository:

cd agon-artifacts
claude --plugin-dir ../Agon --dangerously-skip-permissions --model claude-sonnet-5[1m]

In Claude Code, use these commands to move the research forward:

• /idea-tick: create, review, refine, and literature-check ideas for a topic.
• /proposal-tick: turn selected ideas into reviewed proposals.
• /experiment-tick: coordinate scientist, coder, auditor, and reviewer roles for one workspace.
• /deep-lit-tick: run the shared deep literature loop used by the other stages.

Example Prompts

/deep-lit-tick Exhaustively survey the literature on <topic>, and write the result to topics/mmdd-<slug>-landscape.md.
/idea-tick <topic-slug> <topic> is becoming important. Brainstorm several research ideas.
/idea-tick <idea-slug> I have a vague idea about <topic>. Create the topic file, create the idea file, and refine the idea.
/proposal-tick <idea-1> <idea-2> <idea-3> Generate proposals for these ideas.
/experiment-tick <slug> Start the experiment.
/experiment-tick <slug> This is a debugging run. First explain the full procedure, then pause for my approval after each agent call.

Layout

Agon itself is a Claude Code plugin. Run it from a separate data workspace, commonly named agon-artifacts, so prompts/code and research data can evolve independently.

Expected data workspace layout:

agon-artifacts/
├── topics/
├── ideas/
└── workspace/

Optional local settings live at .settings.toml. Start from .settings.example.toml when you need to customize model routing or parallelism.

claude-ds installation

claude-ds is DeepSeek-backed Claude Code.

1. Before first launch, create an empty ~/.claude-ds/ and only handle symlinks. Claude will generate the rest on first launch:

   • Settings side (symlink): CLAUDE.md mcp-needs-auth-cache.json memory/ plugins/ settings.json settings.local.json skills/
   • Session side (isolated): backups/ cache/ downloads/ ide/ stats-cache.json projects/ sessions/ session-env/ file-history/ history.jsonl paste-cache/ shell-snapshots/ .claude.json
   • The symlinks let claude and claude-ds share skills, MCP, and plugins

2. Add the claude-ds() function to ~/.bashrc:

claude-ds() {
  CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR="$HOME/.claude-ds" \
  ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic" \
  ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="$DEEPSEEK_API_KEY" \
  ANTHROPIC_MODEL="deepseek-v4-pro[1m]" \
  ANTHROPIC_SMALL_FAST_MODEL="deepseek-v4-flash" \
  claude --effort max "$@"
}

Notes:

• Put it before the # If not running interactively guard, so non-interactive shells such as Claude Code's Bash tool can see it
• Add the [1m] suffix to the model ID to unlock 1M context

1. Run claude-ds

Required Claude Code settings

Configure statusline

Tell claude or claude-ds: "call statusline-setup, I want [5h:6% 7d:69%(2d17h)] Ctx:7% Opus 4.6 (1M context)"

References

• ARIS
• AutoResearch-SibylSystem
• Telegram MCP Communicator
• Claude Memory Manager
• humanizer