Confessions of a researchaholic

2026-07-15

Which parts of the research paper process for AI automation?

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 5:15 pm
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Nowadays it is entirely possible to let these AI agents write a research paper and code from ground up based on some initial human instructions. But I think it is important to think about which parts to automate and which parts to keep in human hands.

Personally, these are the parts that I would be happy to delegate to AI:

  • improve writing style and grammar from an initial paper draft
  • help with literature survey, such as finding papers related to a topic
  • critic my writing for clarity, especially on the algorithm descriptions

I would not want to delegate the parts that I need to do manually, at least the first few drafts, to help me think through the research:

  • the ideation parts, such as initial paper title, abstract, and introduction outlining the problem and motivation
  • the core approach, including algorithm description, pseudo code, architecture/pipeline illustration
  • the limitations and future works

This post was inspired by PaperBanana for generating paper figures, which I think would be more suitable for results figures (like statistical plots) than conceptual figures (e.g., algorithm/pipeline illustration).

2026-07-12

Off script

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 8:59 am
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I came across this interesting article about a psychiatrist who chose this profession due to his own early childhood symptoms and later decided to work in a prison because that is where the need is greatest.



2026-07-04

Hot run

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 5:11 pm
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For experimentation and token-minimizing I have been running some open-weight LLMs (e.g., llama3.2 for text and qwen3-coder:30b for code) locally on a MacBook via ollama within VS Code. I noticed that long-context tasks (e.g., analyzing a complex codebase and generating a new feature) can take a long time and compute, eventually heating up the device to a hazardous degree, especially under an ambient room temperature over 90°F.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DaXY3tDj8nM/

2026-07-03

A creative fictional news agency

Filed under: Imaginary,Real — liyiwei @ 3:29 am
Tags: , ,

I created this little code repo as a fun exercise of LangGraph for a news agency that generates fictional news articles based on real events. Some of these articles are available on this Substack site.



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