Andy Hall advice on AI and economic research

Here is the document, excerpt:

In January, I released the results of an experiment showing how Claude Code could helpfully extend old papers “automagically.” It was pretty astonishing to me. Claude was able to come up with a plan, scrape the web, write code, run regressions, create tables and figures, and write a whole memo on what it had found—all in about 45 minutes.

Are AI tools perfect? No. Claude made some interesting mistakes in that extension, and since then, I’ve seen it make a whole bunch more. Are human researchers perfect, though? Hell no. 

The evidence that AI tools should now be an essential part of your toolkit is overwhelming—look at the recent work that my Stanford colleague Yiqing Xu has put out, for example, which allows for the automated verification of empirical research. This is so clearly valuable. When it comes to empirical work, we’re never going back to the pre-AI world.

Here is a thread on the paper, heedworthy throughout.  If you do not have some kind of decent plan here, other economists will leave you in the dust.  Even if it is only a minority of “other economists” their total leverage and impact will be extreme.