(No AI-generated text below) I published a new Claude Code plugin called Lodestone – it’s a SQLlite backed arXiv research paper retrieval system that amplifies the agentic search abilities of Claude Code when grounding plans, implementations etc in state of the art research while remaining very token-sensitive. My bet is that, when seeded, it will always beat Claude Code’s web search tools for grounding Claude in the latest research in a domain or cross-domain and not spend a ton of $ for the pleasure. This audience is probably painfully aware of Karpathy’s LLM wiki tweet and the industry of projects that’s popped up from it; I’ll paste an excerpt from the blog below that I think addresses what you all might be thinking: The Approach Karpathy’s proposal made a lot of sense. Let Claude be the curator and librarian of all this research and access it using its bash and file manipulation tools when necessary. This approach spawned a cottage industry of projects where people implemented various takes on this direction. In parallel, researchers like those that created the ARA Compiler have been trying to move research itself into more a structured, agentic form. I liked all of these ideas, but there were three principles I wanted to uphold while building in this space: The system itself needed to be extremely portable. I wanted this system to follow me from computer to computer and be easily backed up. When ingesting documents, I wanted the system to be as deterministic as possible and spend the least amount of tokens. I didn’t want to expend hundreds of thousands of tokens before getting anything useful out of the system. The system needed to be extremely flexible in how Claude could use it and not prescribe a single method for retrieval. I can’t predict all the ways Claude might use this type of system so I wanted to provide multiple pathways into the data. Given these principles, I was immediately drawn to SQLlite as a backing DB. The unmatched ease-of-use combined with a single file made it the obvious option for portability. Claude could potentially create a sprawling file system when maintaining its own knowledge wiki and I didn’t want to have to learn it when backing up or porting my knowledge base. I gave the ARA Compiler a try while in the middle of building Lodestone. I ran it over a standard-sized paper I was interested in; it produced some cool outputs, but spent almost 500k tokens for the pleasure. This was my fear with it and the ecosystem of projects emerging from Karpathy’s ideas: I had to spend a fair bit of money before I even knew if the system was useful. I knew a SQLlite-backed agentic search system needed a form of classic retrieval (keyword or similarity based), but I also am painfully aware of all the limitations and failures of these approaches to RAG. I wanted to combine this retrieval approach with a retrieval approach from the emerging category of vectorless RAG — a taxonomy that Claude can drill into to get its bearings before drilling further. What followed was Lodestone. Check out the blog post (which also has no AI generated text) here: https://medium.com/@pierce-lamb/lodestone-a-sqlite-backed-arxiv-research-paper-retrieval-system-for-claude-code-b77de201f0c8 The repo’s README is almost entirely AI-generated, so point your Claude Code cannons at that: https://github.com/piercelamb/lodestone submitted by /u/SnappyAlligator
Originally posted by u/SnappyAlligator on r/ClaudeCode