Literature Review

The literature review workflow maps a field: what researchers agree on, where they disagree, and what remains open. When the input names a lab, PI, author, or lab website, /lit runs as a publication-corpus review instead: it resolves the identity, collects reachable publications, and maps research trajectories across them.

Usage

From the REPL:

/lit Scaling laws for language model performance

From the CLI:

feynman lit "Scaling laws for language model performance"
feynman lit "Anthropic interpretability team"

How it works

  1. Plan – Feynman writes the scope (key questions, source types, time period, expected sections, task ledger, verification log) to outputs/.plans/<slug>.md, summarizes it, and continues without waiting for confirmation unless you asked to review the plan.
  2. Gather – Wide sweeps use the researcher agent, which writes <slug>-research-*.md files; narrow topics are searched directly. For a lab or author, the lead agent first resolves the identity and writes a publication log to notes/<slug>-publications.md with titles, years, venues, URLs or DOIs, and gaps.
  3. Synthesize – Findings are separated into consensus, disagreements, and open questions, with suggested next experiments or reading when useful. For a lab or author, Feynman also identifies 3-5 research trajectories and the 3-5 papers that most changed the corpus direction, ranked by contrastive originality, methodology strength, and relationship to prior art rather than author prestige.
  4. Cite – The verifier agent adds inline citations and checks every source URL.
  5. Verify – The reviewer agent checks the cited draft for unsupported claims, logical gaps, and single-source critical findings. FATAL issues are fixed and re-checked; MAJOR issues go into Open Questions.
  6. Deliver – Feynman writes the review and its provenance record and checks that both exist on disk.

Output

  • outputs/<slug>.md – the literature review, with Mermaid diagrams for taxonomies, method pipelines, or trajectory maps when the sources support them
  • outputs/<slug>.provenance.md – date, sources consulted, accepted, and rejected, verification status, and intermediate research files; for lab or author reviews, also the publication log path and unresolved corpus gaps

When to use it

Use /lit at the start of a project to see what has already been done, when preparing a related-work section, or to understand a lab’s or author’s body of work.

For biomedical and clinical topics, see Biomedical Literature Review for research-only framing, evidence-type separation, and privacy boundaries.