#Ai
Much of my early career was peering into black boxes: using open source statistical software, demystifying ML models, communicating causal inference in plain language. With AI I am building AI-assisted tools that do the same. Openness and trust - these are still core to my work.
GitHub - companion-inc/feynman
https://github.com/companion-inc/feynman →
An AI harness for research. I have not tried it out because it seems far too optimized on writing papers which is not my primary output anymore.
Coding agents in the social sciences
https://www.anthropic.com/research/coding-agents-social-sciences →
I’m not surprised by the finding that even among AI users, code harnesses are not used. But if you are not finding value from AI for writing quantitative analysis code and research communication outputs its probably because you aren’t using a coding harness like OpenCode or Claude Code.
RETRACTED ARTICLE: The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysis - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04787-y#Sec6 →
It’s important to remember that the most popular and accessed article about ChatGPT and student learning was retracted. The thing is, retraction is just a label, and people can choose to honor or not honor that label. So keep your eyes out for people citing the study.
Taking action against AI harms - Anil Dash
https://www.anildash.com/2026/02/23/taking-action-ai-harms/ →
Anil Dash is one of my favorite writers about technology. And this is why you will no longer see any Civilytics or Jared Knowles content on Twitter/X - I deleted all our posts after reading this article.
Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I’d like
https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/6/vibe-coding-and-agentic-engineering →
Simon Wilison has lots of great insights, and this one mirrors what I am finding. I am picking up a lot of “engineering” skills on the fly, while I am working on “vibe coding” things that I couldn’t deploy on my own in the past, but that I feel like I know very well what they should look and feel like.
The Paper Factory
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/24xfq_v1 →
Per Engzell and Nathan Wilmers provided some real insight on experiments with how well LLMs can produce quantitative social science paper production, even held back by using Stata of all things.
R as CLI Agent Harness
https://cornball.ai/posts/r-as-agent-runtime/ →
This is an interesting project I am tracking. There are so many AI agent harnesses, but harnesses make such a difference in the capabilities and usefulness of the tools. Particularly smaller LLMs really benefit from strong harnesses. Could be super useful!
I think the folks at Lander Analytics do really interesting cutting edge work and share a generous amount of what they learn. My own experience using a MacStudio for multiple side by side models is similar, but I need to look into these time series models more!