r/MachineLearning • u/NeatFox5866 • 2d ago

Research Claude Code for Research Papers [R]

Third-year PhD student, NLP / interpretability. I want a reality check from people doing similar work.

I started using Claude Code for the boring parts: argparse boilerplate, plotting, config wrangling. Over the last few months the scope has crept. It now writes most of my experiment scaffolding, refactors my dataloaders, does first-pass debugging on training runs, and drafts the analysis scripts. I mostly read diffs and say yes.

The output is fine. My throughput is up. The thing bothering me is that I no longer hold my own codebase in my head. When a result looks off, I used to have an instinct about which line was lying to me. Now I go hunting like it’s someone else’s repo. I catch bugs later than I used to, and I catch them by reasoning about the numbers rather than by knowing the code.

I don’t think the tool is the problem. I think I delegated a layer that was doing more for my understanding than I gave it credit for.

Questions for people further along or in the same spot:

  1. Roughly what fraction of your research code do you write yourself now?

  2. Is there anything you deliberately refuse to hand off? (For me I think the eval harness and anything defining a metric should stay mine, but I keep breaking my own rule.)

  3. Does anyone have a workflow that keeps the speedup without the detachment? Reading the diff line by line is not cutting it.

Not looking for a “tools are just tools” answer. I’m asking about the specific feeling of not owning your own experiments anymore.

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u/MayeeOkamura17 2d ago

Can you point to me what parts of this post makes you think so? I'm curious because OP's sounds similar to how I would write too

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u/whyVelociraptor 2d ago

The whole thing really lol, but one dead giveaway is the end. All the AI posts have this little couple line wrap up at the end that’s something like “Looking for people who have actual experience with…”. or similar. Bonus points for “Not looking for X, looking for Y” bit of this.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/JimmyTheCrossEyedDog 2d ago

It's different, though. I too use phrases that sound like AI, and I refuse to give up the em-dash. But AI posts just don't sound quite like a similarly well-written human post. They're consistently sterile. They live in a particular dimension of how text can sound and they almost never stray from that manifold. The person who responded above pointed out some of the particular phrases, and that's part of it, but like they said, it's the totality of the post that sets off the AI red flags. I'm sure some amateur AI detectives might get tricked by your writing style, but I feel pretty confident that I and many others wouldn't be (most of the time, at least).