Point by Point: Guided R&R Response Letters

  • Author/Source: Abhishek Nagaraj (UC Berkeley Haas)

  • Original: https://r-r-agent.vercel.app/

  • Key Ideas

  • Web app for revise-and-resubmit response letter workflows. Splits every editor and reviewer concern into its own workspace; lets authors draft or dictate responses; provides concrete suggestions; tracks completeness; publishes a LaTeX response letter at the end.
  • Works with or without a revised manuscript — you can run it on referee reports alone, or pair it with the revised draft.
  • Collaboration via a secret URL, so co-authors can join without authentication overhead.
  • Uses the user's OpenAI project API key for parsing referee reports, generating suggestions, cleanup, and "grading" response completeness.

  • Explicitly framed as an experimental public test — 4 MB upload cap; response data may be lost as the prototype changes; ships with an example paper workflow for testing.

  • Summary

A purpose-built tool for one specific, painful, and time-consuming part of academic publishing: writing the response letter to reviewer comments. Most generalist AI tools handle response letters as a single long prompt; Point by Point's contribution is decomposing the task into per-concern workspaces with completeness tracking, so authors can see at a glance which referee point still lacks a response and which have been drafted. The LaTeX export at the end produces a publication-ready response document rather than a chat transcript.

The tool is minimalist by design: bring-your-own OpenAI key, secret-URL collaboration, small file caps. The narrow scope is the point — rather than yet another general-purpose paper-writing agent, it is a single-task workflow honed for the R&R stage specifically.

  • Relevance to Economics Research

R&R response letters are one of the highest-leverage AI-assistable tasks in empirical economics: high effort, structured (one response per concern), with clear ground truth in the form of revised text and reviewer reports. Point by Point's design — per-concern workspaces, completeness tracking — encodes the standard implicit checklist most economists keep in a side document. The tool is also a useful reference design for anyone building Claude Code skills around the R&R workflow: the per-concern decomposition and completeness-grading patterns transfer directly. Worth pairing with Haaland's Reviewer which addresses the upstream side (generating reviewer reports) and ARS's revision-coach mode (which parses reviewer comments into a revision roadmap).