Inspiration: what this project borrowed, and from where¶

Status: reference. Written 2026-08-13.

Every external idea this project took, what was taken, and -- where it matters -- what was deliberately not taken. Credit is the first purpose; the second is that knowing which upstream a design came from is the fastest way to understand why it has the shape it does.

Written for anyone wanting the provenance of a design decision, and anyone checking this project's licence hygiene.

Not covered here: the citation provenance of a draft, which is a different question entirely and belongs to the review layer (CITATION-PROVENANCE.md). This file is about where the pipeline's own ideas came from, not where a draft's claims came from.

The drafting layer's method¶

hadufer/claude-storm (MIT License) -- the .claude/skills/deep-research/ skill and its deep-research-interviewer/deep-research-writer subagents adapt its 7-phase pipeline (perspective discovery, parallel grounded interviews, contradiction mapping, outline, cited writing, synthesis, self peer-review). Retooled here for a closed, citekey-grounded local corpus instead of live web sources -- see reference.md in that skill's directory for exactly what changed and why.
stanford-oval/storm -- the original STORM method claude-storm implements: "Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models" (Shao, Jiang, Kanell, Xu, Khattab, Lam; NAACL 2024; arXiv:2402.14207).
Nav Toor's (@heynavtoor) 4-prompt adaptation, fused into claude-storm's pipeline and carried through into deep-research's synthesis-briefing and single-reviewer (quick depth) peer-review phases.
Imbad0202/academic-research-skills -- the idea behind deep-research's standard/deep-depth peer review (an independent multi-reviewer panel including a dedicated adversarial reviewer, reconciled against a concession threshold) is credited to that project's Stage-3 peer-review design. That project is licensed CC-BY-NC 4.0; no text from it was copied -- .claude/agents/peer-reviewer.md and .claude/skills/deep-research/reference.md §7 are written from scratch, adapting only the concept of an independent panel plus a Devil's Advocate role, not its implementation.

Code standards¶

wojteklu/clean_code.md -- the widely-circulated summary of Robert C. Martin's Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (Prentice Hall, 2008). This is the source standard behind CODE-STANDARDS.md: its section structure (general rules, design, names, functions, comments, source structure, tests, code smells) is the checklist that document is written against, and the rule-by-rule table there records which rules are enforced, which are left to review, and which do not apply to a stdlib-heavy, classless Python codebase.

Two of its rules are load-bearing here in a way worth naming:

Its comment rules -- explain intent, clarify, warn of consequences -- are the canonical support for this repository's house style of dense rationale comments. The rule the canon actually states is "don't be redundant", not "don't comment", and the difference is the whole of CODE-STANDARDS.md's comment section.
Its code smells vocabulary -- rigidity, fragility, immobility, needless complexity, needless repetition, opacity -- is adopted directly as the review vocabulary, because naming a smell is what turns "this feels wrong" into a reviewable claim.

Harness engineering¶

walkinglabs/awesome-harness-engineering -- a curated list for harness engineering: "the practice of shaping the environment around AI agents so they can work reliably." That is a fair description of what most of this repository actually is. The categories it tracks map onto parts of this project closely enough to be worth stating, both as credit and as a reading list for whichever part you are about to change:

Its category	Where this project does that
Specs, agent files & workflow design	CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, DEVELOPER-AGENTS.md, `.claude/skills/`
Constraints, guardrails & safe autonomy	The citation gate and its PostToolUse hook; the review layer's rule that it never blocks (SOUL.md)
Context, memory & working state	The dossier (DRAFT-ITERATION.md), and TOKENS.md for what context costs
Evals & observability	The review layer's three aids, and AUTO-IMPROVEMENT.md's unbuilt `agenda`
Foundations	SOUL.md and DESIGN.md

The gap that list makes most obvious is evals: this project has review aids and a gate, and no benchmark suite measuring whether the drafting layer is getting better. PERFORMANCE.md measures the deterministic half only, and #63's parked evaluation harness is the open thread.

Four public hook collections, read together when working out what a second PostToolUse hook should look like (#185) and why the existing launcher is not portable (#197). What each contributed, and what was refused, is set out in HOOKS.md; in brief:

Upstream	Taken	Not taken
obra/superpowers	The fail-silent contract for a context injection, and the caution that the advisory-context field name differs per host	The polyglot `run-hook.cmd`, which needs shell form and so cannot coexist with exec form
addyosmani/agent-skills	The standard-envelope rule, and testing that a hook's payload parses	Its `jq` dependency, against the stdlib-only posture
shanraisshan/claude-code-best-practice	The survey of hook events, output fields and version-gated options behind this project's `if` and `async` notes	Its per-hook enable/disable config -- the gate must not be individually disableable
affaan-m/ECC	The principle that paths are resolved in the interpreter, not in the shell	The dispatcher process, which trades away fault isolation

The refusals matter as much as the borrowings. Three of the four are fail-silent by design, which is right for what they protect and would be a silently inert citation gate if copied across.

The rule on borrowing¶

Stated once, because it is the same rule the pipeline applies to drafts:

Attribute the idea, and never copy the text. Where an upstream is permissively licensed the adaptation is still written from scratch, and where it is not (academic-research-skills, CC-BY-NC 4.0) only the concept is taken and the entry above says so explicitly. That is SOUL.md's refusal to manufacture support, pointed at this project's own provenance rather than a draft's.