claude-science-local

Claude Science (local) — one-command control

Anthropic's Claude Science compchem / life-science workbench has no Windows build. It runs as a WSL2 Ubuntu daemon serving a web UI on http://127.0.0.1:8000/. The cs dispatcher makes it always-on and one-command from any Windows shell. LOCAL only — no remote/Tailscale.

When to use

• "Start / open Claude Science", "the science UI is down", ":8000 won't load".
• Before another tool or agent calls :8000 — run cs ensure first.
• The daemon is wedged (up but slow/timing out) or off when needed.
• You need a health readout, a recover, or a backup/restore of the science DB.

Two facts that flip every diagnosis

1. HTTP 401 on / = ALIVE. :8000 is behind an auth gate; a 401 (even a 403) means the daemon is answering. Do not read 401 as "down".
2. Slow / timeout = WEDGED, not down. The daemon accepts the socket but answers slowly or never. Root cause: the WSL VM is frozen under host-RAM pressure, which stalls the SQLite operon-cli.db (lock contention — seen up to a 164 s TxMutex hold). A naive "any HTTP response = healthy" probe is blind to this. cs is latency-aware: a response >= 4 s reads as WEDGED, and cs fix recovers it.

The cs verbs (run from PowerShell)

pwsh -File ~/source/agent-skills-toolchain/scripts/claude-science/cs.ps1 <verb>

Verb	What it does
cs open	Ensure up (start-if-down / recover-if-wedged), wait for readiness (not a blind sleep), then open the UI in the browser. The human one-click.

Standard flow

cs doctor — what it checks

Gotchas

Adding data sources (brief)