How to Trace a Deep-Research Workbench in Node.js

#ai #node #opensource #agents

Most research-agent demos optimize for the final answer.

That is the least useful place to debug them.

The operational questions show up earlier:

how the research brief was framed
what source directions were chosen
whether the source mix was too narrow
how the synthesis was assembled
whether the final report preserved confidence and disagreement

That is why we built open-deep-research-workbench:

https://github.com/Tokvera/open-deep-research-workbench

It is a small Node starter that takes a research brief and turns it into:

a research plan
source directions
a citation-aware synthesis
recommended next steps
one Tokvera root trace for the whole workflow

Why this is a better starting point than a flashy research demo

A final answer can look polished even when the workflow behind it is weak.

That is why teams need workflow-level visibility for research agents.

This starter keeps the work inside one root trace:

research brief
  -> plan_research
  -> collect_sources
  -> synthesize_report
  -> return report + citations

Stack

Node.js
Express
OpenAI
Tokvera JavaScript SDK
Zod

Mock mode is enabled by default, so it is easy to run locally.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/Tokvera/open-deep-research-workbench.git
cd open-deep-research-workbench
npm install
copy .env.example .env
npm run dev

The server starts on http://localhost:3400.

Endpoints

GET /health
GET /api/demo-brief
GET /api/sample-briefs
POST /api/research

Example request

curl -X POST http://localhost:3400/api/research \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "topic": "How engineering teams should evaluate coding agents before letting them open pull requests",
    "audience": "Platform and application engineering leads",
    "goals": [
      "Find the main reliability and review concerns around coding agents",
      "Collect practical examples of evaluation workflow design",
      "Summarize what observability signals matter before production rollout"
    ],
    "timeframe": "current developer guidance"
  }'