Vibe physics: The AI grad student

This post details a novel application of AI agent capabilities in theoretical physics research, demonstrating how a human supervisor can guide an AI (Claude Opus 4.5) through a complex, multi-stage scientific calculation and paper generation process. It highlights the AI's ability to perform indefatigably and rapidly (generating a research paper in two weeks with 36M tokens processed), but also its limitations, emphasizing the critical need for human domain expertise to evaluate accuracy and steer the research. The experiment involved strict prompt-based interaction, a structured task breakdown, and the use of markdown files for context management, showcasing a method for AI-assisted frontier science that was not feasible previously. The author frames this as a significant step towards AI-driven scientific discovery, albeit not yet fully autonomous.