I tested what happens when you give an AI coding agent access to 2 million research papers. It found techniques it couldn't have known about.

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Quick experiment I ran. Took two identical AI coding agents (Claude Code), gave them the same task — optimize a small language model. One agent worked from its built-in knowledge. The other had access to a search engine over 2M+ computer science research papers. Agent without papers: did what you'd expect. Tried well-known optimization techniques. Improved the model by 3.67%. Agent with papers: searched the research literature before each attempt. Found 520 relevant papers, tried 25 technique...