Orchestrate academic research and writing workflows
Researchers use Claude Code as an orchestrator for research workflows and as their main tool for writing papers and theses in LaTeX or Markdown.
Done withClaude Code
- What they did
- The thread describes people using Claude Code less as a software engineer and more as an orchestrator for research work. One researcher mapped agent roles like PI, operations, interns, grad students, programmer, and QA/fact-checker; another said they built a similar lab scaffold on Dust with defined roles, while a commenter used Claude Code directly in VS Code to write a master's thesis in LaTeX or Markdown instead of Google Docs.
- How it went
- People in the thread report it works well for structuring research collaboration and speeds up writing, but they also say current tools fight the workflow: model availability changed on Dust, Claude’s context compaction hurt long-form reasoning, other platforms had weak document management, and manual data input remained a problem.
- Worth knowing
- The main catch is setup and iteration: commenters say most effort is in defining roles, folders, and subagents, then repeatedly testing edge cases until inputs and outputs match the workflow.
Try it yourself with Claude Code
Act as the orchestrator for my research project on [topic] in this folder. Read my notes and sources in [folder path], then break the work into steps: summarize each source, build an outline, and draft sections of my [paper or thesis] in [LaTeX or Markdown], keeping citations tied to real files in the folder. Stop when a full first draft and a to-do list of open questions are saved, and ask me before deleting or overwriting any existing file.
Want help getting this working? Join the Vibe Coding Academy ↗ Run by Alex Finn, who also runs this site.
Source: Reddit · Jan 1, 2025
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