Build the Literature Vault
Ingest your sources into a grounded annotated bibliography so the cardinal rule has somewhere to trace claims to — never a fabricated source.
"Every claim traces to a real source" is only as strong as how well your sources are organized. The Literature Vault is where /literature-review and the fact-checker agent get grounded evidence.
1. Drop raw sources in sources/
PDFs, extracted text, your notes — anything. This directory is immutable: the protect-sources hook blocks edits to it. You derive into vault/, you never edit the source.
2. Ingest one source at a time
/lit-ingest sources/doe2023-tooluse.pdf/lit-ingest reads the source, writes a vault/summaries/<bibkey>.md page with claims + locators and verbatim quotes, and proposes the references.bib entry from the document itself.
Metadata it can't read with confidence is left as [VALUE — verify], never guessed. block-fabrication rejects placeholder DOIs, so a half-known reference surfaces instead of slipping in as real.
3. Cross-reference concepts and entities
Each summary links to vault/concepts/<concept>.md (cross-source ideas, e.g. "verification gating") and vault/entities/<entity>.md (benchmarks, datasets, methods). Link liberally with [[wikilinks]] — a link to a page that doesn't exist yet marks something worth writing.
4. Keep it healthy
/lit-lint # contradictions, orphans, missing locators, stale entries
/lit-briefing # what's new since last time + gaps vs your thesis/lit-briefing reports the gaps relative to MANUSCRIPT_MAP.md → Thesis — themes your argument needs that the library lacks. Those gaps become search directions for /literature-review.
5. Synthesize — grounded
/literature-reviewSynthesizes a related-work section from your own library only — thematic, gap-driven, real citations only. It proposes concrete search directions for gaps without fabricating a single source.
The loop: sources/<paper>.pdf → /lit-ingest → references.bib + summary → /literature-review → citation-gate confirms the \cite resolves. See VAULT.md for the full schema.
Fill the Manuscript Map
The single most important setup step — give the agent a thesis, a venue, section budgets, and key sources so it stops drifting and overclaiming.
Respond to Reviewers
Draft a point-by-point response letter that quotes each comment, states the change and its location, and never claims a change that wasn't actually made.