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Glossary

Dong Dai edited this page Apr 18, 2026 · 1 revision

Quick definitions for the terms you'll see across the app and docs. Listed alphabetically.

Agent / Coordinator

The main LLM-driven loop that reads your messages, picks tools, and composes responses. Built on pi-mono. The coordinator is the specific agent configuration Research Copilot ships with — it wires in the research tools and skill registry. Source: lib/agents/coordinator.ts.

Artifact

A structured piece of knowledge the agent can create, edit, and reference. Five types:

Type What it holds
note Freeform Markdown notes
paper Bibliographic records with DOI, bibtex, citeKey, relevance
data Tabular or structured data
web-content Snapshots of web pages the agent fetched
tool-output Raw output from tool calls, preserved for reference

Artifacts live under <workspace>/.research-pilot/artifacts/<type>/ as files. They're searchable and citable via @-mentions.

BM25

A classic ranking function used by the Paper Wiki's search. Matches documents to queries by term frequency and inverse document frequency — no embeddings, no vector DB, no network calls. Fast and offline.

Canonical identity

The rule Paper Wiki uses to decide if two paper records refer to the same work: DOI > arxivId > normalized(title+year). Prevents the same paper from being reprocessed under different keys across projects. See Paper Wiki → Canonical identity.

Coordinator

See Agent / Coordinator.

Intent

A rule-based (and optionally LLM-confirmed) classification of what the user is asking for — one of literature, data, writing, critique, web, citation, grants, docx, or general. Drives which skills get surfaced to the agent. Source: lib/agents/coordinator.ts.

@-mention

An inline reference to an artifact inside a chat message. Typing @ opens a picker; the agent resolves the mention and the referenced content is attached to the message. Parser and resolver live in lib/mentions/.

Paper Wiki

A global, cross-project knowledge base of papers you've touched. See Paper Wiki for the deep dive.

pi-mono

The agent runtime Research Copilot is built on — @mariozechner/pi-coding-agent. Handles LLM integration, session management, tool invocation, and the built-in coding toolkit (read, write, edit, bash, grep, find).

Session summary

A condensed Markdown summary of a chat session, generated automatically as sessions grow. Enables the agent to recall earlier context without re-loading every message. Stored at <workspace>/.research-pilot/memory-v2/session-summaries/.

Skill

A lazy-loaded knowledge module in SKILL.md format that gives the agent domain expertise. Only the shortDescription is loaded at startup; the body loads on demand when the skill is activated. Discovered from three locations (later overrides earlier): builtin → ~/.research-pilot/skills/<workspace>/.pi/skills/. See the Skills Catalog.

Subscription auth

Signing in with ChatGPT Pro / Plus or Claude Pro / Max via OAuth, instead of using an API key. No per-token billing. Tokens are stored in the OS keychain. Research Copilot prefers subscription auth when available — see Getting Started → Sign in.

Tool

A typed function the agent can call mid-conversation. Research Copilot ships with research-specific tools (literature search, web fetch, data analysis, document conversion, artifact CRUD, wiki search) plus pi-mono's general-purpose coding tools (read, write, edit, bash, grep, find). Source: lib/tools/.

Workspace

The folder you opened in Research Copilot. All project-local state — artifacts, session summaries, custom skills — lives under <workspace>/.research-pilot/ or <workspace>/.pi/. Global state (API keys, Paper Wiki) lives under ~/.research-pilot/ and ~/.research-copilot/.

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