Why Existing Research Tools Weren't Enough

Before building Archimedes, I did the obvious thing: I looked around for tools that already solved the problem.
And to be fair, there are a lot of good ones out there.

I tried the usual suspects and explored tools that were good at pieces of the workflow:

• paper search
• literature discovery
• summarization
• note organization
• citation management

The problem was not that these tools were bad.
The problem was that none of them matched the exact shape of the workflow I wanted.

I wanted something more end-to-end.
Something that could start from a research question, pull relevant papers from sources like arXiv and OpenAlex,
analyze them with an LLM, and then produce a direct answer with paper-level evidence.

A lot of tools stop at discovery.
Some stop at summaries.
Some stop at note-taking.
Some are good for collecting information, but not for turning it into a structured report.

That gap mattered to me.

I did not just want more information.
I wanted synthesis.
I wanted a result I could hand to myself or someone else without manually doing all the glue work.

That was the key realization:
the value was not in any single step.
The value was in chaining the steps together into a workflow that felt natural.

So Archimedes became a research assistant instead of just a search tool.
It searches, analyzes, aggregates evidence, and exports the final answer as a PDF.
That is the part I kept coming back to.

It was also the point where the project stopped being "maybe I should build this" and became
"apparently I need to build this because nothing else quite fits."

In the next post, I will talk about the first version that made that idea real:
a simple CLI tool that worked for me before it worked for anyone else.

Comments

[John Giftakis]

nice. interested. url repo?

[Harshal Rudra]

Hey John, I’m trying to turn this into a product. I have a beta version of the website ready and can share it with you. Your review would be really helpful.
Let me know how I can reach out to you.

[John Giftakis]

yeap, why not

[Harshal Rudra]

how do i reach out to you?