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Research & analysis

A product manager with no astronomy training found a planet candidate with AI and won time on a NASA telescope

Pavel Rabtsevich, a product manager in Spain with no astronomy training · X, Reddit (an account that posts about using Claude Code and Codex)

Finding new candidates in public science data with a coding agentSee the reference

Research & analysis

One overnight pass over 4.35 million Dutch East India Company pages turned up rhinos and eruptions no list had recorded

Jesse Waites, software engineer in Boston · personal blog. Waites's post introducing Antiquity presents this project as a case study and carries a notice for JTPCK, a company that takes on custom AI document analysis work. Waites's relationship to JTPCK has not been disclosed.

Searching old archives with AI agentsSee the reference

Research & analysis2026.09.27

AI agents finished whole research papers on their own, but judgment, not experimentation, is where they stalled

Researchers from Princeton, the UK AI Security Institute, and other institutions gave frontier agents the research questions behind two unpublished NeurIPS submissions, then had the original authors grade the results. The agents handled everything from the literature review to typesetting without human help, yet both papers were rejected. Here are the five failures the paper traced in the run logs, along with the limits the authors acknowledged.

AI-generated

Research & analysis

It started with one line, "I need a paper-search skill," and ended with a stranger's broken skill fixed on the spot and the papers found

Claude Code研究所 (Claude Code Lab), a Japanese account that runs Claude Code training · X

find-skillsSee the reference

Research & analysis

Handed over 500 emails, and in 25 seconds it picked out only the ones that need a reply

Creator Riley Brown · his own inbox

JevSee the reference

Research & analysis

Copying a stranger's planet hunt turned up two more Earth-size candidates that no catalog listed

Thick_Ad_9875, a Reddit user who wrote "im not an astronomer" · Reddit, Zenodo

Finding new candidates in public science data with a coding agentSee the reference

Research & analysis

The dodo record had a five-year gap. AI dug through old records and found a 1615 hunt inside it

Benjamin Breen, associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz · Res Obscura (Substack)

Searching old archives with AI agentsSee the reference

Research & analysis

Without knowing any skill names, just said "find me a skill that checks SEO," and it came back with a pick and the install command

Korean YouTuber Data Popcorn

find-skillsSee the reference

Research & analysis

Months of screenshots, 970 of them, sorted themselves into travel, work and payment folders in 40 seconds

Fayaz Ahmed, developer educator at Cloudflare · his own screenshot folder

JevSee the reference

Research & analysis

One morning with Claude Code and TESS data turned up two Earth-size planet candidates

Paras Chopra, founder of web analytics company Wingify, now running the AI lab Lossfunk · 240,000 followers on X

Finding new candidates in public science data with a coding agentSee the reference

Research & analysis

Given one scan and about six hours, GPT-6 Astra read a Napoleonic army cipher letter no one had read in 217 years

Carter Church, AI engineer at SentinelOne · personal site

Searching old archives with AI agentsSee the reference

Research & analysis

Gave it one brand's 1,891 ads, and in 19 seconds it sorted them by stage of the customer journey

Stav Zilbershtein of the marketing AI tool Maxfusion · a demo of the company's own tool

JevSee the reference

Research & analysis

He's not an astronomer, but he analyzed NASA data with AI and wrote a research paper

Independent researcher Friedrich Otto Krone · A preprint on Zenodo, not yet reviewed by a professional astronomer

Finding new candidates in public science data with a coding agentSee the reference

Research & analysis

Ran an editorial team's AI-writing checklist over 37 articles at once, and it took less than a second

Mike Taylor, head of evaluation at the US publication Every · 27 of his own pieces

JevSee the reference

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Research & analysis

A product manager with no astronomy training found a planet candidate with AI and won time on a NASA telescope

One overnight pass over 4.35 million Dutch East India Company pages turned up rhinos and eruptions no list had recorded

AI agents finished whole research papers on their own, but judgment, not experimentation, is where they stalled

It started with one line, "I need a paper-search skill," and ended with a stranger's broken skill fixed on the spot and the papers found

Handed over 500 emails, and in 25 seconds it picked out only the ones that need a reply

Copying a stranger's planet hunt turned up two more Earth-size candidates that no catalog listed

The dodo record had a five-year gap. AI dug through old records and found a 1615 hunt inside it

Without knowing any skill names, just said "find me a skill that checks SEO," and it came back with a pick and the install command

Months of screenshots, 970 of them, sorted themselves into travel, work and payment folders in 40 seconds

One morning with Claude Code and TESS data turned up two Earth-size planet candidates

Given one scan and about six hours, GPT-6 Astra read a Napoleonic army cipher letter no one had read in 217 years

Gave it one brand's 1,891 ads, and in 19 seconds it sorted them by stage of the customer journey

He's not an astronomer, but he analyzed NASA data with AI and wrote a research paper

Ran an editorial team's AI-writing checklist over 37 articles at once, and it took less than a second

The week in AI: the BESTjust 3, straight to your inbox

The week in AI: the BEST
just 3, straight to your inbox