Two plugins, two decisions
They are separate because they are separate consent decisions.probe-research
Tracking. Skills that teach the agent the experiment workflow, and a read-only MCP server it searches your lab’s history with.Writes go through the
probe CLI, never through MCP.probe-research-tap
Session capture. Streams this device’s sessions to the team knowledgebase: your prompts, the agent’s replies, and the shell commands you run.Per-device, disclosed twice before it starts, off at any time.
What the agent can do with them
Search what the team already did
Search what the team already did
Before proposing a direction, the agent can check whether somebody already tried it — across runs, notes, sessions, papers and connected sources. That is the read half, and it is available even with writes turned off.
Record work as it happens
Record work as it happens
Create the project and experiment explicitly, open runs, route files to artifacts and numbers to metrics, write decisions into notes, and close with the real lifecycle outcome. At the moment it happens — not summarised at the end of the session.
Instrument a script before it costs GPU hours
Instrument a script before it costs GPU hours
/instrument-code wires probe.init and probe.log into a trainer, an eval or a sweep, including trainers that already have their own tracker.Show you where the work stands
Show you where the work stands
/visualize-progress renders the tracked state, the gaps, and the arc as one timeline with the next action named — every line read back from Probe, never from the session’s own memory.The switch
One control governs the whole conversation.Only the researcher moves the switch. Typed bare by you it toggles between
on and read; off is not on that cycle and is reached only by typing it. An agent invoking the skill itself loads guidance and never changes the state.- This conversation
- Wizard
- Command
Type it in the agent:Or from a shell, against the current session:
probe session status returns the full decision, including which default applied and whether the capture daemon is actually running — so “tracking is on” and “anything is being recorded” can be told apart.
What each surface is allowed to do
The read/write split is structural, not a policy setting. An agent with only the MCP server cannot change anything.
The managed rules block
The install writes a managed Probe block into each selected agent’s global instruction file, prompting it to search Probe and track research there. Everything outside the block is left alone.- Wizard
- Command
Skills
Every skill, when it fires, and what it does.
MCP reference
Six tools, token budgets, pagination, entity views.
Session capture
What leaves the machine, and how to stop it.
Status line
The tracked/untracked indicator in Claude Code.