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Crux — find the crux of why papers disagree, entirely on your device. Every research tool (Elicit, Consensus, scite) tells you *that* papers disagree. None tells you *why* — and with students and researchers now drafting papers with AI, people cite results that quietly conflict without ever knowing. Worse, the papers that most need checking — unpublished drafts — are exactly the ones you can't paste into a cloud chatbot. Crux is a local-first research agent built on Gemma 4 (E4B, on-device via Ollama). Drop 2–3 PDFs and it runs a full sense → decide → act → check loop: - Sense — extracts structured claims on-device; every claim must carry a verbatim quote verified string-for-string against the source, so hallucinated claims are structurally impossible. A deterministic pattern miner backstops the small model so headline numbers are never missed. - Decide — pairs comparable claims across papers (including scaling-law coefficients by their role in the equation, not by dataset) and adjudicates each pair precision-first: 1.00 precision, zero false contradictions on our labeled eval. - Act — the agent autonomously designs a POPPER-style falsification experiment (H₀/H₁, held-fixed variables, decision rule) for the top contradiction — no click needed. - Check & recover — failed chunks retry locally with expanded boundaries (streamed live); low-confidence numeric claims are explicitly handed off to the human. A narrated, timed agent worklog shows every step. A hard Local / Auto / Cloud selector enforces routing per-request; every verdict carries an engine badge showing what produced it. Pull the WiFi — extraction, verdicts, and experiments keep working. Flagship demo: Kaplan et al. 2020 (N ∝ C^0.73) vs DeepMind's Chinchilla / Hoffmann et al. 2022 (a ≈ 0.50). Crux rediscovers the most consequential contradiction in modern ML on a laptop, and designs the experiment that settles it. Stack: Gemma 4 E4B on-device · hosted Gemma 4 31B escalation · Gemini 3 Flash (reconcile/experiment) · Gemini Flash (grounded chat) · Next.js 15 · also ships as an installable Electron app. Live: https://crux-two-phi.vercel.app (cloud preview — the full on-device loop runs locally / in the video). Sample contradictory-paper library included in the repo.

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