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张洲诚（Zack.ZHANG）
张洲诚（Zack.ZHANG）

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One CLI for Every Stage of Writing a Paper — Proposal to Defense

#ai #cli #writing #productivity

The stress that hits during thesis season

The paper isn't even done, and you're already drowning in tools: plagiarism check on one site, AI-content detection on another, a paraphraser here, a translator there, references formatted by hand, and a LaTeX error that eats half an hour of googling. A huge chunk of your energy goes into copy-pasting between a dozen tools.

Then there's the "AI smell" problem. In 2025 China's Ministry of Education folded AIGC detection into the quality framework for degree theses, with a clear line: AI assistance is allowed, AI ghostwriting is not. Many schools now treat the AIGC score as a hard gate alongside plagiarism. The catch: detectors disagree wildly — the same paper can score 70% on one service and 5% on another, and even acknowledged classics get flagged.

I'm no academic heavyweight — I just got tired of tool-hopping and wondered: could one tool absorb all the mechanical, repetitive parts of paper writing? Running it through Bailian's CLI (bl), it turned out nine stages, proposal to defense, really can be covered by a single command.

⚠️ Up front: everything below is writing assistance — gathering material, structuring ideas, polishing phrasing, fixing formatting. It does not write your paper, and it is not a way to beat the detector. The ideas, data, and conclusions are yours to research, verify, and stand behind.

Nine stages, one capability

Nine-stage paper writing pipeline

① Proposal  → ② Lit review  → ③ Draft skeleton
④ Polish    → ⑤ Paraphrase  → ⑥ De-AI phrasing
⑦ Translate → ⑧ LaTeX check → ⑨ Defense slides
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Under the hood they're all bl text chat — one long-form chat command. Swap the prompt, do a different job. No separate site or subscription per stage.

Install (two lines) 

npm install -g bailian-cli
bl auth login
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You'll need Node.js. New users get free credits.

Default model is qwen3.7-max.

A few representative stages

Proposal — the problem often isn't that you can't write, it's that you haven't figured out what to write. Let it give a solid frame, then fill it with your research:

bl text chat \
  --system "You are an academic writing assistant. Produce standard, verifiable drafts for the author to research and revise." \
  --message "For the thesis 'Multimodal Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages', draft a proposal: background, state of the art, goals, roadmap, novelty, timeline" \
  --max-tokens 6000
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The frame is its work; the research is yours — verify every claim and citation against real literature. For references, use it only to format (e.g. APA 7th), never to invent citations — fabricated references are textbook misconduct.

De-AI phrasing — the headache of 2026. Students who wrote every word themselves still get flagged because the prose is too tidy:

bl text chat --message "The text below reads mechanical and templated. Rewrite it to sound more natural and personal without changing the academic meaning: <paragraph>"
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To be crystal clear: this exists to improve mechanical phrasing in genuine writing so wrongly-flagged original work reads more human. It is not for laundering ghost-written text. If the content was AI-written to begin with, no rewriting makes it honest.

The remaining stages — lit review, draft skeleton, polish, paraphrase, translation, LaTeX check, defense slides — follow the same pattern; long documents go through --messages-file.

Cost

The whole flow is basically token cost — a few dollars for an entire paper, versus per-paper paraphrasing sites or the several-hundred-yuan "human de-AI" grey market. New users get free credits.

The honest limits

  • It won't do your research — ideas, novelty, and data are yours.
  • Verify every citation — models fabricate references; use it only for formatting.
  • Paraphrase/de-AI aren't magic — if content is ghost-written, no tool saves it.
  • Rules vary by school — some require declaring AI assistance; check first.

Start with whichever stage hurts most.

This is a walkthrough of a writing-assistance tool. Every stage is framed as assistance, not ghostwriting. Follow your institution's and journal's academic-integrity and AI-use policies; originality, data accuracy, and integrity are the author's own responsibility.

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