Academic Writing Toolkit

Academic Writing Toolkit (AWT) is an open-source, local-first system for evidence-controlled academic work. It gives AI agents repeatable skills, inspectable files, and deterministic checks for reading, literature review, argument design, bounded revision, citation auditing, clean-room review, and release governance.

The core promise is simple: agents may help operate the workflow; the author keeps control of claims, boundaries, approvals, and the exact artifact that ships.

Latest tag: v0.6.0-rc.2, a pre-release, and the last state of AWT as a DeepSeek Harness (dsh) distribution: the skills as they stood at that tag, plus a guard plugin with typed denials. That distribution is retired from main as of 2026-09-20; the decision record carries the evidence. In short: its enforcement claims were CI-proven (E0), its one paired-source pilot (E1) was negative, and the author's own chapter cycle (E2) was never run. Everything it contained is at the tag.

What main ships now is the skill catalogue, the audits and the workspace scaffold, run inside the author's own agent host. Enforcement is that host's business.

v0.5.0 is the last release of the previous product — the Workbench wheel, Codex plugin package and ChatGPT App, all decommissioned since. It is still the place to get those, and nothing on main replaces them.

AWT is not a hosted writing service and does not operate a manuscript-storage backend. Its deterministic tools stay local and need no model key. Online reference metadata checks run only when you explicitly add --online.

Why AWT exists

Fluent text hides three failures that a manuscript pays for at review. A source is remembered rather than read, and the sentence says more than the source does. A contribution is named as if nobody had named it before. And the prose carries the shape of the model that drafted it, in ways the author has stopped seeing. AWT is built around those three, in that order: the first two are the kind of error reviewers do not forgive, the third the kind they only notice.

Question	What AWT gives the author
Does each cited claim stay inside what the source says?	one notes file per source with page anchors and an evidence-status field; a citation-fidelity audit that reads those notes; a claim ledger binding each claim to an archived snippet; offline BibTeX checks
Is the contribution placed against what already exists?	a claim-positioning audit on the manuscript's own terms, and a prose baseline built from what the target venue actually published
Does the prose read as the author's?	a fingerprint measured against the project's own literature, by distribution rather than by count, with the numbers a manuscript prints bound to the artifacts they came from
Did a check that found nothing actually look?	every check exits non-zero on an empty target and reports what it read; a registry keeps that true for every new check

The judgements stay with the author. A machine reading is labelled as the machine's, and an approval an agent types into a file it can edit is a record, not a gate.

How it fits into writing