As neurons are not meant to be alone,my posts about data science, research findings, and other musings are to connect to the larger neuroscientific community.
Say hello to sciClaw🦞🧪 - your paired scientist.
An open-source local research assistant, searches pubmed, writes and revises word docs with tracked changes, and logs everything for reproducibility. MIT.
Built by a physician-scientist on top of @SipeedIO's picoclaw, inspired by @steipete.
Custom new CLIs for pubmed, docx, audits, phi-cleaning, etc.
ChatGPT login OR bring your own AI model. YT tutorial, docs, github, preprint in thread 🧵
Contributors welcome!!!
#sciClaw #OpenClaw #agents #OpenSource #Science
sciClaw v0.3.2 is out
Addons are here optional sidecars for webtop browser desktops and Jupyter notebooks.
Also: gpt-5.5 and tighter security
brew upgrade sciclaw
https://t.co/C1hVa2Ap4J
Hotfix: sciClaw v0.2.8 — OpenAI changed how Codex streams responses and every message went blank. Found it, fixed it, shipped it same day. If your bot was saying "did not produce a user-facing reply" — upgrade now.
brew upgrade sciclaw && sciclaw service refresh
sciClaw 101 - starting a project with a collaborator
In Discord:
1. co-scientist accepts invite and joins server
2. setup a private channel for the project
3. add the co-scientist and sciclaw users
In sciClaw admin panel
1. grant user permissions to sciclaw bot
2. route new channel to a shared/cloud folder
3. share folder with co-scientist
tag sciclaw and get to work!
sciClaw is a research agent built for how labs actually work. Multiple scientists share one AI through Discord. Drop a dataset, ask for an analysis, and your collaborator picks up right where you left off.
Built for bench-to-manuscript:
- PubMed search and citation graphs
- Word documents with tracked changes
- Figure generation
- Full evidence trail your PI can review
We just launched our community Discord.
Come talk about your workflows, get help setting up, or shape what we build next. → https://t.co/IBFAzG9SMe
Why this matters: sciClaw agents run multi-hour research sessions in Discord — literature searches, document drafting, data analysis. Without context compaction, the agent either hits the window limit and loses memory, or you pay for 80% stale history on every turn.
ctxclaw gives us a clean boundary: the runtime does agent work, ctxclaw decides what old context stays live. sciClaw v0.2.6 ships with ctxclaw integration built in.
brew install drpedapati/tap/ctxclaw
We kept hitting the same problem running sciClaw in long Discord sessions: the agent burns most of its context window replaying stale tool outputs nobody needs anymore. A 2000-line file read from 40 turns ago is still sitting in history, and every new turn pays for it.
ctxclaw sits between your agent runtime and the model call. It reads the assembled prompt envelope from stdin, identifies bloat, and emits a smaller prompt on stdout.
What it actually does:
- moves oversized old tool outputs to archive files
- replaces stale conversation history with a checkpoint summary
- preserves the recent, structurally valid tail
It's not an agent. Not a memory store. Just a prompt-context optimizer.
https://t.co/Tcv0tlfHIK
New CLI: `sciclaw prompt inspect --session `. Shows exactly how many tokens each part of your prompt uses — identity, bootstrap files, skills, memory, history, tool schemas. Debug context window issues without guessing.
sciClaw v0.2.6 is out — the first stable release with a full browser-based web UI. Manage channels, routing, models, skills, and a new System tab that diffs your workspace personality files against the release templates.
brew update && brew upgrade sciclaw
sciclaw service refresh
https://t.co/mppROpsoKG
Adding a Discord channel to sciClaw routing used to mean copying a channel ID from Discord settings. Now the routing wizard auto-discovers your servers and channels — pick from a searchable list. Also added a folder browser for workspace paths. No more typing paths blind.
I went back to chatgpt 5.4 to make a formatted reference list. I even gave it the actual pubmed ids. 2/4 were still hallucinated.
Save yourself the anxiety and make sure the agent uses a proper tool to directly query the database. Try my MIT pubmed-cli tool for zero hallucination free reference searches. https://t.co/tpfTwlwTgn
used in https://t.co/4OHl47xOHL too!
Try asking your agent working on one repo to investigate a bug on dependency repo and log a pull request. Lots of wins where your whole ecosystem gets stronger.
Discord use is cleaner now.
This release adds:
- clearer job/status behavior
- real slash-command support for /btw and /skill
- better support for Anthropic OAuth users through the Claude bridge
If you already use sciClaw, upgrading is straightforward:
https://t.co/S1gEruHnLr
sciClaw v0.2.4 is out.
This release is mostly about making sciClaw easier to use in real research work, especially in shared chat channels and longer scientific workflows.
brew tap drpedapati/tap
brew install sciclaw
to upgrade:
brew upgrade sciclaw
Release notes: https://t.co/nTTCZgKFqp
Research workflows got stronger too.
This release improved built-in support for:
- PubMed and citation lookup
- document-based workflows
- weather and other simple utility lookups
- more reliable handling of uploaded files and follow-up tasks
So sciClaw is better at staying grounded in the actual materials you’re working with.