alphaXiv's openresearch-cli turns coding agents into researchers

alphaXiv released v0.1.117 of openresearch-cli on August 28, then pushed another update August 31, keeping a near-daily pace. The MIT-licensed Rust tool wraps Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode in a loop built for research. It proposes an idea, edits the code, launches an experiment, and inspects the evidence, then repeats.

Git tracks code changes, not which experiment run produced which result. Most labs track that by hand or not at all, and it falls apart once several runs happen in parallel.

Each run gets its own isolated worktree. An experiment tree then keeps the lineage of every branch, so you can trace which idea produced which result even across parallel runs. Jobs dispatch to local machines, SSH, Slurm, Kubernetes, Ray, HF Jobs or Modal, so the tool doesn't assume a single cluster.

At 527 stars, openresearch-cli is still small, but daily patches since the August 28 tag show momentum for a tool this specific. Watch whether other research tools on GitHub adopt the same worktree-and-lineage pattern instead of scripts-in-a-folder setups.