I can’t imagine letting an agent try everything that the LLM chatbot had recommended ($$$). Often coming up in recommendations are very poorly maintained / niche libraries that have quite a lot of content written about them but what I can only imagine is very limited use in real production environments.
On the other hand, we have domain expert “consultants” in our leadership’s ears making equally absurd recommendations that we constantly have to disprove. Maybe an agent can occupy those consultants and let us do our work in peace.
A lot depends on whether it is expensive to you. I use Claude Code for the smallest of whims and rarely run out of tokens on my Max plan.
For all the folks spending a lot of time and energy in setting up MCP servers, AGENTS.md, etc. I think this represents more that the LLM cannot do what it is being sold as by AI boosters and needs extreme amounts of guidance to reach a desired goal, if it even can. This is not an argument that the tech has no value. It clearly can be useful in certain situations, but this is not what OpenAI/Anthropic/Perplexity are selling and I don’t think the actual use cases have a sustainable business model.
People who spend the energy to tailor the LLMs to their specific workflows and get it to be successful, amazing. Does this scale? What’s going to happen if you don’t have massive amounts of money subsidizing the training and infrastructure? What’s the actual value proposition without all this money propping it up?
I found LLMs make a fabulous frontend for git :-D
This was the case for me a year ago. Now Claude or Codex are routinely delivering finished & tested complete features in my projects. I move much, much faster than before and I don’t have an elaborate setup - just a single CLAUDE.md file with some basic information about the project and that’s it.
What’s the point of adding features that are inscrutable? I have gotten Claude to make a feature and it mostly works and if it doesn’t work quite right I spend a massive amount of time trying to understand what is going on. For things that don’t matter too much, like prototyping, I think it’s great to just be able to get a working demo out faster, but it’s kind of terrifying when people start dong this for production stuff. Especially if their domain knowledge is limited. I can personally attest to seeing multiple insane things that are clearly vibe coded by people who don’t understand things. In one case, I saw API keys exposed because they were treating database users as regular user accounts for website login auth.
This is, of course, only applicable if doing a single test is relatively fast. In my work a single test can take half a day, so I'd rather not let an agent spend a whole night doing a bogus test.
Definitely not in the budget for non-VC-backed companies who aren’t in the AI bubble.
I started looking at Kaggle again and autoresearch seems to converge to many of the solution vibes there.
Wild ensembles, squeezing a bit of loss out. More engineering than research IMO
If you're resource unconstrained then BO should ofc do very well though.
Good Bayesian exploration is much, much better than grid search, and does indeed learn to avoid low value regions of the parameter space. If we're talking about five minute experiments (as in the blog post), Bayesian optimization should chew through the task no problem.
I wrote up some more notes on that here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/13/liquid/
It’s certainly cool, but the optimizations are so basic that I’d expect a performance engineer to find these within a day or two with some flame graphs and profiling.
So cheaper than a performance engineer for a day or two... but the Shopify CEO's own time is likely a whole lot more expensive than a regular engineer!
What about more distant software projects? Give it the CPython source code and say you want it to be faster.
Good lens.
The crux of the auto research repo is basically one file - program.md which is a system prompt that can be summarized as “do this in a loop: improve train.py, run the training, run evals, record result. Favor simplicity”. The other files are an arbitrary ML model that is being trained.
[1] https://github.com/ykumards/eCLIP/commits/main/autoresearch
i.e. perhaps minimal changes to autoresearch can take control for cost-effective research to occur.
The bottleneck in AI/ML/DL is always data (volume & quality) or compute.
Does/can Autoresearch help improve large-scale datasets? Is it more compute efficien than humans?
There always are. You need to think about what those would be, though. Autoresearch outsources the thinking to LLMs.
Non-parametric optimization is not a new idea. I guess the hype is partly because people hope it will be less brute force now.
I recall reading about a stochastic one years ago: <https://github.com/StanfordPL/stoke>
There are lots of old ideas from evolutionary search worth revisiting given that LLMs can make smarter proposals.
Yes, for example "swarm optimization".
The difference with "autoresearch" (restricting just to the HPO angle) is that the LLM may (at least we hope) beat conventional algorithmic optimization by making better guesses for each trial.
For example, perhaps the problem has an optimization manifold that has been studied in the past and the LLM either has that study in its training set or finds it from a search and learns the relative importance of all the HP axes. Given that, it "knows" not to vary the unimportant axes much and focus on varying the important ones. Someone else did the hard work to understand the problem in the past and the LLM exploits that (again, we may hope).
This has been the standard approach for more complex LLM deployments for a while now in our shop.
Using different models across iterations is also something I've found useful in my own experiments. It's like getting a fresh pair of eyes.
Alternatively, a modular model with multiple “experts” that I could mix and match for my specific stack
I don’t need the model to know all of the Internet plus 20 different human languages. I just want it to be really good with the stack of the project
That's such a weird switch. There's lots of free medical imaging online. Example: https://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/
[0] https://gist.github.com/adam-s/88cdc61820519cfbcb480b4653e0a...
love2read•1h ago