Hey everyone. I’ve been using Claude Code a lot for my physics research, and it always felt slightly wrong — like I was forcing a coding tool to do work it wasn’t really shaped for. So over the last few months I built Triptych, a three-panel workspace that sits on top of Claude Code and gives it room to actually do research. A bit of motivation up front: Claude Code works so well for coding because the filesystem and compiler close the loop — wrong code crashes. For a wrong derivation, nothing crashes. Worse, I noticed my best sessions weren’t the ones where I just accepted Claude’s answer; they were the ones where I argued with it, made it argue against itself, and surfaced what it was silently assuming. Triptych is shaped around that kind of back-and-forth rather than around “give me the answer.” The three panels: Left — workspace for me: tldraw drawing canvas, document editor, spreadsheet, markdown editor with KaTeX, code editor, PDF viewer, and a “desktop window watcher” that lets Claude see any window on my desktop Middle — display for Claude: matplotlib and plotly charts, LaTeX equations, Three.js 3D surfaces and vector fields, step-by-step derivations, a research state graph that tracks verified results Right — Claude Code itself with full filesystem access The filesystem is the communication channel. When Claude writes a plot to workspace/output/ , the display auto-reloads. When I sketch something on the canvas, Claude can see the screenshot. No database, no plugin registry — files all the way down. The whiteboard is the part I reach for most. I can sketch a problem by hand — write out a Lagrangian, work through the algebra, draw a free-body diagram — and Claude reads the canvas directly. So I do physics the way I actually think (handwritten, messy) while Claude checks my algebra mid-derivation and formalizes what I wrote into LaTeX when I’m done. Because it runs in the browser, I open it on a tablet for the whiteboard at the same time as my laptop for the display. Working in parallel. Because Claude Code is agentic, while I’m deriving something by hand it can be running a numerical solver on the equations it’s already seen, building a simulation of the system, or generating plots of the limiting cases in the background. By the time I finish the algebra, the next thing I’d ask for is usually already sitting in the display. Verification + push-back. An independent agent checks every significant claim without seeing Claude’s reasoning, using SymPy, numerical spot-checks, and dimensional analysis. At milestones a second agent re-derives the result via a different method, and a separate red-team agent reads the work and tries to challenge it. The red-team is calibrated to return “nothing substantive” when the work is sound — an agent that always finds problems is just as useless as one that never does. There’s also a sister pass that surfaces unstated assumptions before a result becomes load-bearing. Triptych vs autoresearch. If you have a clear metric to optimize (benchmark score, latency, accuracy on a fixed set), Karpathy’s autoresearch is probably the right tool. Triptych is for the messier stuff in between — derivations, design calls, anything where the work is partly figuring out what counts as the right answer. Example session (one of my actual prompts): “I have a coupled oscillator system with two masses and three springs. Set up the Lagrangian, derive the equations of motion, solve for the normal modes, and show me a 3D visualization of each mode with a slider for the mode amplitude.” Claude writes the Lagrangian to the display as rendered LaTeX, the derivation appears step by step with numbered equations, the verifier agent checks each step independently, and a Three.js panel shows up with a slider. Takes about a minute. Five commands, the rest is automatic. The whole user-facing API is five commands shaped like the arc of doing research: /start , /explore , /work , /check , /wrap . Plain language works too. Everything else (verifier, watcher, domain mentors for physics/math/ml, ~40 methodology skills) activates automatically when relevant. If you’re ever lost, type /triptych — it reads where you are, asks what you’re trying to do, and recommends a next move without auto-deciding for you. Ask it to build whatever you want. Triptych runs Claude Code with filesystem access to its own source, so if there’s a display type or workspace addon I haven’t built, you can just ask Claude to add it while you’re using the tool. If Claude Code can do it, Triptych can do it. Heads up — it’s not really a study tool. If you’re a student working through homework you can use it however you want, but you’ll probably learn the material less well than if you struggled through it yourself. Free, runs locally, BYO Claude Code install. It’s a personal project — I’m a physics student and I work on it when I have time. GitHub: https://github.com/frodo2647/triptych Would love to hear what you’d want in a tool like this, or if anyone ends up using it for something real. submitted by /u/Frodo2647
Originally posted by u/Frodo2647 on r/ClaudeCode