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/explain

Get a plain-language explanation of recent experiment results and their implications.

Usage

/explain

What It Does

  1. Reviews recent history -- Reads the latest entries in experiment_log.tsv and any recent research or debug artifacts.
  2. Synthesizes context -- Connects results across multiple experiments to identify patterns, trends, and key takeaways.
  3. Generates explanation -- Produces a clear, non-technical summary of what happened, why it matters, and what to try next.
  4. Updates insights -- Appends the most important findings to .researchpad/experiments/insights.md.

Example

> /explain

Output might include:

Over the last 5 experiments, reducing the learning rate from 1e-2 to 3e-4 steadily improved validation accuracy from 0.82 to 0.89. The biggest jump came from adding gradient clipping (exp-043), which eliminated the NaN issues seen in exp-042. The model appears to be approaching a plateau -- consider trying a different optimizer or augmenting the training data.

Artifact Format

The /explain command appends to:

  • .researchpad/experiments/insights.md -- New insights are added as sections at the end of the file

Unlike /research and /debug, this command does not create a new file. It updates the existing insights document, which the Dashboard displays in the Insights panel.

Cumulative by design

Each /explain invocation adds to the insights file rather than replacing it. Over time, this builds a comprehensive record of your project's learnings.