Lens

Quickstart

Get up and running with Lens in under 5 minutes.

What is Lens?

Lens is a local AI-powered research agent. It's like having a dedicated research assistant that can scan millions of academic papers, technical repositories, and public knowledge sources to answer your questions.

Instead of spending hours searching through multiple websites, Lens does the heavy lifting for you by gathering, processing, and summarizing information into structured reports.

Prerequisites

  • Python 3.10 or higher
  • pip package manager
  • Internet connection

Installation

Option 1: Via pip (Recommended)

The easiest way to get started as a user.

bash 
pip install lensdev

Option 2: From Source (Developers)

Clone the repository if you want to contribute or customize the engine.

bash 
git clone https://github.com/developer8sarthak/lens-research.git
cd lens-research

# Create venv
python -m venv venv

# Activate (macOS/Linux)
source venv/bin/activate

# Activate (Windows)
venv\Scripts\activate

pip install -r requirements.txt

Your First Research Query

Running your first research session is simple. Choose a topic and run the command:

bash 
lens research "Quantum Computing in 2026"

What happens next?

Lens will show a progress bar as it queries various collectors. When finished, it will save a beautifully formatted report.md and report.html in your workspace folder.

Project Resources

Latest Version

lensdev v0.1.2

Project Links

GitHub Repository PyPI Package
v0.1.2 / v0.1.1

Using Docker

If you prefer containerization, you can build and run Lens using Docker.

bash 
docker build -t lens-research .
docker run -v $(pwd)/data:/app/data lens-research

Next Steps

Research Flow Understand how data moves through the engine.
→
Collectors Library Explore supported sources like arXiv and GitHub.
→
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Introduction
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Configuration