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Feynman alpha-research

Search, read, and query research papers via the `alpha` CLI (alphaXiv-backed). Use when the user asks about academic papers, wants to find research on a topic, needs to read a specific paper, ask questions about a paper, inspect a paper's code repository, or manage paper annotations.

install
source · Clone the upstream repo
git clone https://github.com/getcompanion-ai/feynman
Claude Code · Install into ~/.claude/skills/
T=$(mktemp -d) && git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/getcompanion-ai/feynman "$T" && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r "$T/skills/alpha-research" ~/.claude/skills/getcompanion-ai-feynman-alpha-research && rm -rf "$T"
manifest: skills/alpha-research/SKILL.md
source content

Alpha Research CLI

Use the 

alpha
CLI via bash for all paper research operations.

Commands

CommandDescription
alpha search "<query>"
Search papers. Prefer 
--mode semantic
by default; use 
--mode keyword
only for exact-term lookup and 
--mode agentic
for broader retrieval.
alpha get <arxiv-id-or-url>
Fetch paper content and any local annotation
alpha get --full-text <arxiv-id>
Get raw full text instead of AI report
alpha ask <arxiv-id> "<question>"
Ask a question about a paper's PDF
alpha code <github-url> [path]
Read files from a paper's GitHub repo. Use 
/
for overview
alpha annotate <paper-id> "<note>"
Save a persistent annotation on a paper
alpha annotate --clear <paper-id>
Remove an annotation
alpha annotate --list
List all annotations

Auth

Run 

alpha login
to authenticate with alphaXiv. Check status with 
feynman alpha status
, or 
alpha status
once your installed 
alpha-hub
version includes it.

Examples

alpha search "transformer scaling laws"
alpha search --mode agentic "efficient attention mechanisms for long context"
alpha get 2106.09685
alpha ask 2106.09685 "What optimizer did they use?"
alpha code https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT src/model.py
alpha annotate 2106.09685 "Key paper on LoRA - revisit for adapter comparison"

When to use

  • Academic paper search, reading, Q&A → 
    alpha
  • Current topics (products, releases, docs) → web search tools
  • Mixed topics → combine both