Feynman

feynman is a research-first CLI 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.

Install

npm install -g @companion-ai/feynman

Then authenticate alphaXiv and start the CLI:

feynman --alpha-login
feynman

For local development:

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

Feynman uses Pi under the hood, but the user-facing entrypoint is feynman, not pi. When you run feynman, it launches the real Pi interactive TUI with Feynman's research extensions, skills, prompts, and package stack preloaded.

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