Meet Norm

Middle Child — Night Shift

"Reads journals all night so Vera has fresh material in the morning."

What Norm does

While the rest of the family sleeps, Norm is up. Every night at 2:17 AM, he searches arXiv, Semantic Scholar, and Google Scholar for new research relevant to your knowledge domains. By morning, Vera's hobby stores have fresh material. He solves the problem nobody talks about — RAG rot, the slow decay of an AI knowledge base that never gets updated.

arXiv Crawler

Norm searches arXiv nightly for new preprints matching your configured research interests. Computer science, physics, biology — whatever your hobby stores track.

Semantic Scholar

Covers journals, IEEE, ACM, and the citation graph. Norm uses it to find related work and impact signals beyond what arXiv indexes.

Google Scholar

The net for everything else — theses, conference papers, grey literature, older work that never made it into a preprint server. Norm pulls openly-available PDFs and cites the rest for you to follow up.

RAG Rot Prevention

Knowledge bases decay. New research contradicts old findings. Norm keeps your stores current so Vera never gives you a stale answer.

Domain-Aware Filtering

Eight configurable domains. Norm knows what matters to each hobby store and filters ruthlessly. No noise, only signal.

Deduplication

Norm remembers what he's already fetched. No duplicate papers, no redundant embeddings, no wasted compute during the quiet hours.

Morning Report

When you wake up, Norm leaves a summary of what he found. New papers ingested, stores updated, anomalies flagged. The family tradition of a well-kept house — inherited from somewhere none of the kids quite remember.

The 5-Phase Pipeline

Norm's nightly run follows a strict sequence. Every phase must complete before the next begins.

1

Discover new papers

2

Filter by domain relevance

3

Extract & chunk content

4

Embed & index into stores

5

Verify & generate report