research-loom

research-loom is a monorepo for a reusable research harness, composable research profiles, writing/publication skills, organization-specific plugins, and project configuration.

What it does

Research Loom keeps an LLM-assisted research project auditable: the conversation proposes, but only exact, Decision-bound commits change research state, and every material and claim stays traceable to pinned sources.

Through the production CLI (below) and its Application Facade a host can:

• Bind a workspace to an exact Project Config and Effective Profile Set (init, status, resume, doctor, profile).
• Run research: register inputs, propose and review research questions, run capabilities such as Desktop Research, Survey (real and virtual respondents) and Delphi, and inspect runs and captured external materials (research-input, run, external, survey, delphi, candidate, synthesis-candidate, exhibit).
• Gate changes through people: proposals become Confirmations and Human Decisions before any atomic commit (actions, action, confirmation, decision).
• Package and write: evaluate research quality, build pinned Research Packages, and round-trip detached Writer input and manuscript revisions, with writing feedback routed back to research (research-quality, research-package, writer-composition, writer-round-trip).
• Publish: build DOCX/PDF previews, run machine and editorial checks, and release only on a bound human decision (publication).

Late needs found while writing or publishing (a missing figure, a missing warrant) return to research instead of being patched in prose.

The canonical code lives in core/, profiles/, plugins/, skills/ and projects/ (see Target areas). The legacy research-harness/ and research-profile/ trees were removed in #500; the legacy-archive-2026 tag keeps them, and docs/migration/misco-legacy-sources/ keeps the files the migration ledger pins.

For a human-facing research session driven by Codex or ChatGPT Work, explicitly load skills/research-conversation/SKILL.md. The repository does not assume either host automatically discovers this skill, and repository development/review tasks should not be routed through it.

For Work deployment, see runtime readiness, durable continuation and file delivery. Work reuses the existing Application Facade/CLI; a scratch workspace still requires a provisioned runtime and a durable whole-workspace backup before cross-session continuity can be promised.

Production CLI

Research Loom requires Python 3.12+ and uv. Root pyproject.toml and uv.lock are the single repository/application dependency contract.