Scientific Automation

A lab workflow is a terrible place to discover that your AI agent has been “remembering” chemistry as a conversation. That sounds unkind. It is also the point. In a casual chatbot, losing track of context means an awkward answer. In computational chemistry, losing track of context can mean a wrong molecular geometry, a missing imaginary-frequency check, an invalid charge or multiplicity, or a pKa estimate that looks numerically confident while being scientifically useless. The model did not necessarily become stupid. The workflow around it treated state as text. ...

Let There Be Light (and Agents): Automating Quantum Experiments A lab notebook is not just a diary. It is an institutional memory system with bad handwriting, missing parameter values, and occasional coffee damage. That is not a joke, unfortunately. In experimental science, much of the valuable knowledge sits between formal theory and physical execution: which crystal goes with which pump, how the beams should be routed, which detector timing window is plausible, which old setup can be reused, and which beautiful simulation is quietly lying through its teeth. ...

A scientist does not usually fail because they cannot ask the right question. More often, they fail because the useful answer is buried behind five separate systems: a biomedical knowledge graph, a disease-module algorithm, a drug-prioritization method, a literature database, and a visualization tool that looks innocent until someone has to configure it. ...

Reviewers are the unglamorous load-bearing wall of science. They slow things down, miss things, disagree with each other, and occasionally write comments that make authors reconsider their life choices. They are also the reason published knowledge is not just a PDF-shaped rumour. So when a conference lets AI agents act as both primary authors and reviewers, the tempting story writes itself: silicon scientists have entered the building, peer review is next, and human academics can finally retire into committee work, where they have been spiritually living for years. ...

A junior researcher is not usually asked to invent an entirely new field before lunch. They are given a paper, a codebase, a baseline, and a moderately suspicious supervisor. They read, try a few modifications, break something, fix it, run experiments, write up the result, and then discover that reviewers are not, in fact, decorative. ...