Ian Mulvany

April 8, 2026

AI things, god, more of them


Another AI agentic scientist.
https://github.com/getcompanion-ai/feynman

Another AI question answer assistant (being flogged in Insta and backed by YCombinator)
https://app.answerthis.io/

Find references in seconds (and maybe don't hallucinate that shit while your at it)
https://www.sourcely.net/

People love these tools, they are trusted by 1000's of researchers (apparently).

What I feel like is that these are all fairly thin layers on top of the literature, and it used to be that there might be some moat to being able to create a compelling feature set, or good UI, but that moat is crumbling. At the same time the ability of the gates of knowledge creation to create good UX remains appalling, but those gates are the tributaries which feed this great corpus of knowledge, and the process and practice of the creation of knowledge remains challenging. 

About Ian Mulvany

Hi, I'm Ian - I work on academic publishing systems. You can find out more about me at mulvany.net. I'm always interested in engaging with folk on these topics, if you have made your way here don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything you want to share, discuss, or ask for help with!