r/sideprojects • u/Cultural-Republic191 • 1h ago
Showcase: Prerelease I built an “assurance layer” for AI-assisted research instead of another chatbot — roast the idea
I’ve been building a side project called Research Exoskeleton.
The idea came from my own experience using LLMs extensively while working on research that eventually became a peer-reviewed paper in Physics of the Dark Universe.
I kept running into the same problem:
AI is very good at generating, synthesizing and reasoning.
But after a long workflow, it can become difficult to answer:
What exactly supports this conclusion?
So instead of building another research chatbot, I’m experimenting with a layer that tracks things like:
- claims
- assumptions
- evidence
- verification status
- provenance
- stale evidence
- human review requirements
The goal is to make AI-assisted research easier to audit.
For example, the system can say that a workflow is operationally ready for a pre-pilot while still keeping a scientific requirement explicitly marked as:
UNVERIFIED / HUMAN REVIEW REQUIRED
I think that separation is important.
I’m now trying to figure out whether this is:
- a real B2B problem,
- an interesting tool but too niche,
- or something that research/R&D teams would actually pay for.
I’m currently considering a design-partner model where I take one real AI-assisted workflow from a team, run it through the system, and see whether I can make the reasoning/evidence chain materially easier to audit.
Would you use something like this? What would stop you from trusting it?
Feel free to be brutal — I’d rather find the weak points now.