Coding agents that read papers before writing code find optimizations that code-only agents miss.

We added a literature review phase to Karpathy’s autoresearch loop and pointed it at llama.cpp. The agent autonomously read arxiv papers, studied competing forks and spun up VMs to run parallel experiments.

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I'm working on this also from a different angle. Hopefully sharing adds to the conversation.

First, about the loop, Claude's (coding agent) context and attention is big enough to self-reflect. Agent Tuning shows a technique that not only demonstrates this but a way quantify it. [0] The difference is autoresearch's val_bpb measures what the agent built; Agent Tuning's p̂ measures the agent itself.

> Claude's attention doesn't distinguish between "instructions I'm writing" and "instructions I'm following" -- they're both just tokens in context.

Second, doing research, finding academic research to add to context helps. Here is an example of an implementation that creates trading strategies by reading research and recreating them in creative new ways. [1]

The biggest problem is the coding agents don't "Fail fast and loud". They fail deceivingly.

[0] https://github.com/adam-s/agent-tuning

[1] https://github.com/adam-s/alphadidactic

This is obvious, right? If you want to build a Facebook clone, you wouldn't tell the agent "build Facebook". You would provide it with a description of every page on Facebook, behaviors, interactions, UI, etc.

I use #PPPCDC for prompting: plan,plan,plan then verify with: Compare the plan to the existing Code. Reread and compare the plan to the Docs. Fix the areas you're not Confident about.

I think anyone who uses Claude knows that it works smarter when you have it make a plan first, and ask it to research the existing code as much as possible first ... so the results in this article doesn't surprise me at all.

However, I'd be curious to hear back from others who have tried adding the shell script (at the end of the article) to their flow: does it (really) improve Claude?

The skypilot devs need to focus on decoupling their offering, so that their very valuable "find the cheapest cloud" functionality isn't married to a glitchy reinvention of Kubernetes JobSet and MLflow

I've been making skills from arxiv papers for a while. I have a one for multi-object tracking for example. It has a SKILL.md describing all important papers (over 30) on the subject and a folder with each paper's full content as reStructuredText.

To feed Arxiv papers to LLMs I found that RST gives the best token count/fidelity ratio. Markdown lacks precision. LateX is too verbose. I have a script with the paper's urls, name and date that downloads the LateX zips from Arxiv, extracts it, transforms them to RST and then adds them to the right folder. Then I ask a LLM to make a summary from the full text, then I give other LLMs the full paper again with the summary and ask them to improve on and and proofread them. While this goes on I read the papers myself and at the end I read the summaries and if I approve them I add it to the skill. I also add for each paper info on how well the algorithms described do in common benchmarks.

I highly recommend doing something similar if you're working in a cutting-edge domain. Also I'd like to know if anyone has recommendations to improve what I do.

Research step makes sense, can also confirm that running multiple agents with diverse strategies also compound results more quickly than single agents

A research step (gather insights from across the codebase and internet for how to accomplish the next step), planning step (how should I sequence implementation given that research), an implementation step, and a verification step (code review of the implementation) is super effective workflow for me.