Researchers Must Adopt AI Toolkits

An experiment showed Claude Code could extend an old economics paper end‑to‑end in about 45 minutes: it planned an approach, scraped data, wrote and ran code, produced tables/figures, and wrote a memo. Combined with work on automated verification, this suggests AI can regularly perform reproducibility and extension tasks that were previously manual. — If true, academic incentives, peer review, hiring and the division of labor in empirical fields will shift rapidly toward those who embed AI in their workflows, affecting who gets credit and how research quality is judged.