Feynman

feynman is a research-first agent scaffold built on @mariozechner/pi-coding-agent.

It keeps the useful parts of a coding agent:

file access
shell execution
persistent sessions
skills
custom extensions

But it biases the runtime toward research work:

literature review
paper lookup
replication planning
experiment design
writing notes and reports

The primary paper backend is @companion-ai/alpha-hub and your alphaXiv account. The rest of the workflow is augmented through a curated .pi/settings.json package stack.

Setup

cd /Users/advaitpaliwal/Companion/Code/feynman
npm install
cp .env.example .env
npm run start

If you already use pi, Feynman will reuse the usual auth/config locations for model access.

Before deep paper work, make sure alphaXiv auth is set up:

npx @companion-ai/alpha-hub login

Commands

Inside the REPL:

/help shows local commands
/new starts a new persisted session
/exit quits
/lit-review <topic> expands the literature-review prompt template
/replicate <paper or claim> expands the replication prompt template
/reading-list <topic> expands the reading-list prompt template
/paper-code-audit <item> expands the paper/code audit prompt template
/paper-draft <topic> expands the paper-style writing prompt template

Custom Tools

The starter extension adds:

alpha_search for alphaXiv-backed paper discovery
alpha_get_paper for fetching paper reports or raw text
alpha_ask_paper for targeted paper Q&A
alpha_annotate_paper for persistent local notes
alpha_list_annotations for recall across sessions
alpha_read_code for reading a paper repository

Feynman uses @companion-ai/alpha-hub directly in-process rather than shelling out to the CLI.

Curated Pi Stack

Feynman loads a lean research stack from .pi/settings.json:

pi-subagents for parallel literature gathering and decomposition
pi-docparser for PDFs, Office docs, spreadsheets, and images
pi-web-access for broader web, GitHub, PDF, and media access
pi-markdown-preview for polished Markdown and LaTeX-heavy research writeups
@kaiserlich-dev/pi-session-search for recall across long-running research threads
@aliou/pi-processes for long-running experiments and log tails
pi-wandb for experiment tracking
pi-zotero for citation-library workflows

Layout

feynman/
├── extensions/   # Custom research tools
├── papers/       # Polished paper-style drafts and writeups
├── prompts/      # Slash-style prompt templates
├── skills/       # Research workflows
└── src/          # Minimal REPL wrapper around pi-coding-agent

2.7 KiB Raw Blame History