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.

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.