A deep-research agent with an enforced budget, verified quotes, and a privacy boundary for local data. Ask a question. mole decomposes it, searches, reads sources, extracts claims, checks each claim against the text it came from, looks for contradictions between them, and writes an answer with citations. Every model call is reserved against a budget before it happens and settled after, so the ceiling you set is the ceiling it hits. It runs as a single static binary on your machine, uses your own API keys, and speaks MCP so a coding agent can drive it — either by handing mole a question and collecting the answer, or, in toolkit mode , by doing the reasoning with its own model while mole supplies the parts that are not model calls. Why mole Three things mole does that a chat interface with web search does not. The budget is enforced, not estimated. Every call is reserved before it is made and settled after, against a ledger with non-negative constraints in the database schema itself.…