Mole: Deep-Research Agent with Enforced Budget and Verified Quotes for Your Terminal

Mole is a deep-research agent that runs in your terminal. It decomposes a question, searches the web, reads sources, extracts claims, checks each claim against the text it came from, and writes an answer with citations. Unlike chat-based agents, it enforces a strict budget, verifies every claim, and keeps your local data private.

Enforced Budget

Every model call is reserved against a budget before it happens and settled after, using a ledger with non-negative constraints in the database schema. The --usd 0.50 flag means the run stops at fifty cents. Measured overshoot across the test corpus is 0%.

Verified Quotes

Every claim carries a quote that appears verbatim in the source page. Claims that don't pass this check are discarded at extraction. Surviving claims can be re-read against their source, and unsupported ones are marked in the report.

Local Data Privacy

Point mole at a CSV or folder, and it analyzes the data without the contents leaving your machine. The model chooses a hypothesis template and column names; mole runs the SQL locally. Only aggregates (counts, means, test results, buckets covering at least five records) are allowed back. mole crossings shows exactly what left your machine.

Installation

Install via script (Linux/macOS):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lajosdeme/mole/main/install.sh | sh

Or via Homebrew:

brew install lajosdeme/mole/mole

Arch Linux (AUR): yay -S mole-research-bin or mole-research. Debian/Ubuntu: download the .deb from the releases page. From source (Go 1.25+): go install github.com/lajosdeme/mole/cmd/mole@latest.

Configuration

You need a search provider and a model provider. Keys live in ~/.config/mole/config.json with mode 0600 — never in environment variables. Mole supports most LLMs, including coding agents, subscriptions, and local models.

MCP Support

Mole speaks MCP, so a coding agent can drive it — either by handing mole a question and collecting the answer, or in toolkit mode, where the agent does the reasoning while mole supplies the non-model parts.

It's free and open source, runs as a single static binary with no runtime dependencies.