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agent · 08research & monitoring

Research and monitoring agents

Job: read more than a person can — tender bulletins, competitor price pages, gazettes, POTRAZ and Reserve Bank notices, supplier catalogues — and produce a short, cited digest of what changed. Autonomy: assist. The output is a document a person reads, never an action.

The loop

  1. A schedule (daily, weekly) or a webhook (new gazette published) starts a run.
  2. The agent fetches each source through a web_fetch or file tool, with a per-source token cap so one long PDF cannot consume the budget.
  3. It compares against the last stored version and extracts changes into a structured record: what, where, when, quoted passage, URL.
  4. It writes the digest — three lines per item, each with a citation — and files the structured records for search.

Citations are the guardrail

Misinformation is the specific risk of research agents (OWASP LLM09). The control is mechanical: a digest item without a URL and a quoted passage is rejected by the orchestrator before it is sent, and the quoted passage must appear verbatim in the fetched source. That single rule turns "the agent thinks the interbank rate moved" into "the RBZ page says 26.66 on 31 August" — checkable in a click.

Cost drivers

Inputs are long: a 100 kB documentation page is about 25,000 tokens. Costs are therefore dominated by how many sources you re-read in full rather than diff. Store the last fetched text, compare with ordinary code, and send the model only the changed sections. Synthesis across many sources benefits from a larger model; extraction from one source does not. Two hundred reports a month sits in a band of US$40–250 (illustrative). None of this is real-time, so the Batch API's 50% discount applies.

Zimbabwe-specific sources worth monitoring

  • POTRAZ quarterly sector performance reports (telecoms and internet statistics).
  • Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe exchange rates and monetary policy statements.
  • ZIMRA public notices (fiscalisation, deadlines).
  • Veritas Zimbabwe (statutory instruments, bills) — the source for the SI 155 of 2024 text cited on this site.
  • Government and parastatal tender notices and your sector's regulator.

Not a research agent

Anything that acts on findings — placing an order when a price drops, submitting a bid — is a different agent with write tools and a confirmation gate. Keep the research agent read-only and let a person decide; if you want the next step automated, design it as a separate, gated agent and evaluate it separately.

Retrieval-augmented generation, in the glossary