But the intellectually interesting part for me is something else. I now have something close to a magic box where I throw in a question and a first answer comes back basically for free, in terms of human effort. Before this, the way I’d explore a new idea is to either clumsily put something together myself or ask a student to run something short for signal, and if it’s there, we’d go deeper. That quick signal step, i.e., finding out if a question has any meat to it, is what I can now do without taking up anyone else’s time. It’s now between just me, Claude Code, and a few days of GPU time.

I don’t know what this means for how we do research long term. I don’t think anyone does yet. But the distance between a question and a first answer just got very small.

— Dimitris Papailiopoulos (https://twitter.com/dimitrispapail/status/2023080289828831349), on running research questions though Claude Code

Tags: research (https://simonwillison.net/tags/research), coding-agents (https://simonwillison.net/tags/coding-agents), claude-code (https://simonwillison.net/tags/claude-code), generative-ai (https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai), ai (https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai), llms (https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms)