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raphmantoday at 5:25 PM2 repliesview on HN

tl;dr: Use this if you don't like doing science or doing things well. It hallucinates references.

Seems to be based on https://github.com/swaruplab/operon as evidenced by the authorization dialog and https://x.com/testingcatalog/status/2037684573161783373 .

Mostly targeted at life sciences - e.g. integration for FDA, PubMed, genomics databases but no ACM / IEEE as far as I can tell.

Edit: arXiv search seems to be supported - but not Google Scholar etc. So, this tool is of little use for most researchers outside life sciences.

Edit 2: Quick walkthrough: the AppImage starts a browser window with an onboarding wizard and a chat interface. It suggests a few things one might do at the start of a research project - e.g. do a quick literature review. When I chose that option, wrote Python scripts that used MCP calls to do arXiv searches. Stayed seemingly stuck there for a few minutes not returning anything. Then:

> The free-text search returned too much noise

Claude decided to choose a certain paper as a starting point for further research. Shortly afterwards:

> That DOI resolved to the wrong paper. Let me find the correct anchor papers by title/author search directly.

Then it meandered a few more minutes doing research and creating a citation graph (that it did not show to me).

> I have a complete picture. Let me verify the key DOIs resolve and then write the review.

Then:

> The lint flags em-dash overuse. Let me reduce them, then save.

Then: a nice but verbose literature overview of my chosen topic

<blink>BUT it includes at least one hallucinated reference!</blink>

P.S.: What does this mean?

  [reviewer] verifier_mode=default-on downgraded to off: pro subscription tier, autoReviewer withheld (frame=f2a81cb2)

Replies

Retr0idtoday at 6:11 PM

> The lint flags em-dash overuse

An explicit text desloppification pass (i.e. LLM-use obfuscation) seems like outright scientific fraud.

show 2 replies
sampotoday at 5:42 PM

Biosciences mostly don't use arXiv, they have their own https://www.biorxiv.org/ but it's usage is not as common as arXiv is in e.g. physics.