Paper Draft

Turn research findings into a polished paper-style draft with equations, sections, figures, and explicit claims.

The paper draft workflow turns research findings into a structured academic document. It uses the writer subagent to produce well-organized prose from collected notes, with inline citations, LaTeX equations where appropriate, and figures with captions.

Invocation

CLI

feynman draft "<topic>"

REPL

/draft <topic>

Examples

feynman draft "a survey of retrieval-augmented generation techniques"
feynman draft "efficient fine-tuning methods for large language models"

/draft sparse attention mechanisms: a comparative analysis
/draft "on the scaling properties of mixture-of-experts models"

Workflow stages

1. Outline

   Before writing, the lead agent outlines the draft structure: proposed title, sections, key claims to make, source material to draw from, and a verification log for critical claims, figures, and calculations. The outline is written to outputs/.plans/<slug>.md and presented to you for confirmation before proceeding.

2. Write

   The writer subagent produces the draft from the collected notes and outline. The draft includes at minimum:

   • Title and abstract
   • Problem statement
   • Related work
   • Method or synthesis
   • Evidence or experiments
   • Limitations
   • Conclusion
   • Sources appendix with direct URLs for all primary references

   Clean Markdown is used throughout, with LaTeX where equations materially help the exposition. Quantitative data, benchmarks, and comparisons are rendered as charts using pi-charts; architectures and pipelines use Mermaid diagrams. Every figure includes a caption.

3. Cite and verify

   The verifier subagent adds inline citations to the draft and verifies every source URL.

4. Claim sweep

   Before delivery, the draft is swept for any claim that sounds stronger than its supporting evidence. Tentative results are labeled as tentative; unsupported numerics are removed rather than left for the verifier to discover.

5. Deliver

   Exactly one draft is saved to papers/<slug>.md.

Outputs

Artifact	Path
Draft outline	outputs/.plans/<slug>.md
Final paper draft	papers/<slug>.md

Paper-style drafts are saved to papers/ rather than outputs/. This follows the workspace output convention defined in AGENTS.md.

Draft structure

The produced draft follows standard academic structure:

• Abstract — concise summary of scope and key findings
• Introduction — motivation, context, and contribution statement
• Related work — survey of prior work with inline citations
• Method or synthesis — the core technical content
• Evidence or experiments — results, benchmarks, or analysis
• Limitations — honest assessment of scope and gaps
• Conclusion — summary and future directions
• Sources — complete bibliography with direct URLs

Subagents used

Subagent	Role
writer	Produces the structured draft from collected notes and the confirmed outline
verifier	Adds inline citations and verifies source URLs

Working from existing research

/draft is a natural follow-up to Deep Research or Literature Review. When you have already gathered source material in a session, the writer draws from those findings directly rather than re-gathering sources.

/deepresearch "efficient attention mechanisms"
# ... review the brief ...
/draft "efficient attention mechanisms: a survey"

Run /draft after /deepresearch or /lit to skip the research phase. The writer uses the session’s already-vetted findings to produce a more focused draft.

Related

• Deep Research — gather source material before drafting
• Literature Review — structured academic survey to draw from
• Peer Review — review the draft once written