# Alpha Insights V4.1 Launch Note

Most AI research failures do not look like crashes. They look like confident shortcuts.

A model summarizes beautifully, skips the hard question, accepts a weak source, blends assumptions with evidence, and still writes like it knows exactly what it is doing. Alpha Insights is built to attack that failure mode.

Alpha Insights is an open-source business research SKILL for Claude Code-compatible runtimes and Codex Desktop. The goal is not to make AI sound more like a consultant. The goal is to force it to work more like a serious analyst: staged research, explicit evidence, framework selection, contradiction handling, validation gates, and persistent artifacts.

## The Thesis

Prompt-only workflows describe good behavior. Harness-enforced workflows make bad behavior harder.

In serious business research, the common failure modes are predictable:

- The model jumps to synthesis before the problem is framed.
- It uses frameworks as decoration instead of reasoning tools.
- It cites weak sources with the same confidence as strong ones.
- It skips contradiction checks when the context gets long.
- It produces a polished report before the evidence is actually ready.

Alpha Insights turns those failure modes into system design problems.

## What V4.1 Adds

V4.1 productizes the dual-platform release path:

- Claude Code-compatible users keep the Skill frontmatter hook model.
- Codex Desktop users get a dedicated installer and hook wrappers.
- Stage 3.5 validation is now a first-class runtime path.
- Release verification checks install paths, hook wiring, and platform adapters.

The Skill core stays shared. The runtime adapters handle platform differences.

## Why It Matters

The point is not simply faster research. Faster shallow research is still shallow.

Alpha Insights is designed around three levels of value:

- L1: reduce desk research time;
- L2: improve analysis quality through methodology and evidence discipline;
- L3: compound research artifacts into reusable knowledge.

That third level is where AI research starts to become organizational infrastructure instead of disposable output.

## Try It

GitHub: [Ericyoung-183/alpha-insights](https://github.com/Ericyoung-183/alpha-insights)

Demo report: [EV charging competitive analysis](https://ericyoung-183.github.io/alpha-insights/assets/demo-report.html) (compact Tier 2 public demo)

Release: [V4.1 dual-platform release](https://github.com/Ericyoung-183/alpha-insights/releases/tag/v4.1.0)

Disclosure: this note was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by Eric before publication.
