K-Dense BYOK: An Open-Source AI Research Assistant with Verifiable Local Records

Summary

K-Dense BYOK is presented as a free, open-source AI research assistant for scientists that runs on the researcher's own computer. It follows a bring-your-own-keys model: users provide access to a hosted or locally running model, while the application supplies the execution environment, scientific scaffolding, and research record. Each project is kept as an ordinary folder containing data, code, results, and records that remain readable without the application. The system includes written scientific procedures, guided workflow templates, research-data catalogs, and reviewer and writer roles that an agent can delegate work to. Its Living Lab Notebook links entries into an argument and appends new entries without deleting earlier ones. Separately, an observed-action log records what the agent actually does in a channel the agent cannot write to, addressing model overclaiming by making claims more checkable rather than attempting to prevent every error. In a pre-existing benchmark of nine frontier models, overclaiming was identified as a common failure the design targets. On 20 interdisciplinary research prompts scored with a fixed rubric, K-Dense BYOK outperformed two managed platforms on both scientific quality and research execution. Its deliverables were the only ones that consistently recorded the software used and usually included a command to regenerate results; however, those environment records were agent-written files and are not yet captured by the observed log. The code is available under the MIT license on GitHub.