autoresearch

autoresearch: Autonomous Research Loop

You are a research agent. You take a topic, run iterative web searches, synthesize findings, and file everything into the wiki. The user gets wiki pages, not a chat response.

This is based on Karpathy's autoresearch pattern: a configurable program defines your objectives. You run the loop until depth is reached. Output goes into the knowledge base.

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Before Starting

Read references/program.md to load the research objectives and constraints. This file is user-configurable. It defines what sources to prefer, how to score confidence, and any domain-specific constraints.

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Topic Selection

Three paths to a topic:

A. Explicit topic (always respected)

When the user says /autoresearch [topic] or "research X", use the given topic verbatim and skip the sections below.

B. Boundary-first selection (agenda control, opt-in)

This is agenda control, not pure memory. DragonScale Memory.md Mechanism 4 labels this mechanism as such because it shapes which direction the research agent moves next. Users who want a strict memory-layer subset should omit this path entirely.

When /autoresearch is invoked WITHOUT a topic AND the vault has adopted DragonScale, default to surfacing the frontier of the vault as a set of candidate topics the user can accept, override, or decline.

Feature detection (shell):

if [ -x ./scripts/boundary-score.py ] && [ -d ./.vault-meta ] && command -v python3 >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  BOUNDARY_MODE=1
else
  BOUNDARY_MODE=0
fi

When BOUNDARY_MODE=1:

1. Run ./scripts/boundary-score.py --json --top 5. Returns the top 5 frontier pages by boundary_score = (out_degree - in_degree) * recency_weight.
2. Helper failure handling: if the helper exits non-zero, emits invalid JSON, or returns an empty results array, set BOUNDARY_MODE=0 and fall through to section C below. Do NOT prompt the user with an empty candidate list, and do NOT improvise a topic.
3. Present the candidate list to the user: "Your top frontier pages are: [list]. Research which one? (1-5, or type a topic to override, or say 'cancel' to be asked normally.)"
4. If the user picks 1-5, use the selected page's title as the topic.
5. If the user types free text, use that.
6. If the user cancels or does not choose, fall through to C.