Hunt for exoplanet candidates in public telescope data with Claude Code
A Reddit post, widely discussed on HN, describes an amateur using Claude Code to search public data and find what he thinks is an unknown planet.
Run deep research with a hard budget and verified quotes
An open-source terminal research agent enforces a spending cap, attaches a source to every claim and keeps local data local.
- Difficulty
- IntermediateOur rating
- Time to build
- Not reportedOur estimate
- Monthly cost
- Not reported
- Revenue
- Not reportedWe only show revenue the source states
- Engagement
- 100 HN points14 comments · fetched Oct 15, 2026
What they did
Give Mole a question (and optionally a CSV); it researches within your budget, quotes sources and analyzes local files without uploading them.
How it went
The author reports 0% measured budget overshoot.
Worth knowing
This is the builder launching their own product on HN.
Builder recipe
Our own starting point, written from the source. Adapt it to your setup.
Stack
- Mole
- Any LLM or local model
Steps
- Define the question and success criteria.
- Let agents search, run or summarize in parallel.
- Verify key results yourself.
- Write up findings with sources.
Starter prompt
With a $1 budget, find the 5 best sources on [question], quote the exact lines that answer it, and say what remains uncertain.Tags
Industry Research
Read the original
- Hacker News: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49303046 ↗ (opens in new tab) Aug 14, 2026 · 100 points, 14 comments (fetched 2026-10-15)
- GitHub: github.com/lajosdeme/mole ↗ (opens in new tab) Aug 14, 2026
Related use cases
Screen new magnetic materials for computer memory with an agent team
A researcher used a team of Claude Opus agents to run physics simulations and surface two candidate magnets for spin-based memory, then published every calculation.
Study which tools coding agents pick for you
A team ran about 17k coding-agent sessions to see which databases and services Claude Code, Codex and Cursor choose.
Use a browsing agent to settle conflicting vendor claims for a design review
An engineer used Manus as a cloud intern to research a vendor and architecture memo where three sources disagreed.
The Daily 5.
Five real AI agent use cases each morning, each with a recipe and a source. Plus a Sunday roundup. Free.