Vibe Researching

Vibe researching is doing real empirical social science by directing coding agents — Claude Code and Codex — rather than writing every line yourself. You describe the study; the agent runs the brainstorm, the design, the analysis, the draft, and the checks. The discipline that separates it from careless automation is verification: nothing is trusted until an independent pass confirms it.

This is the home of my participant handbook, written for a two-hour hands-on workshop. It is not a slide transcript — it is a tutorial you can work through at your own pace, on your own machine, from “Claude is not yet installed” all the way to a complete, verified, journal-ready paper draft built on real CFPS data. Every command, figure, table, and verification finding in it came from an actual run — including the seven critical errors that verification caught before the manuscript went anywhere.

What’s inside

The handbook is built around one running example — a Social Forces-style paper on the Chinese digital divide, built from six waves of CFPS (2010–2020) using only Claude Code, Codex CLI, and the open-scholar-skill suite.

  • Part I — Foundations. Install the agents, open your first session, learn the safe project layout, and write an agent-quality prompt.
  • Part II — Open Scholar Skills, end to end. Every major skill in the order you actually use them: brainstorm → idea → design → EDA → analysis → write → verify → citations → polish.
  • Part III — Orchestrators. When one paper deserves the full pipeline (scholar-full-paper, scholar-auto-research), plus Codex as an external reviewer.
  • Part IV — Responsible practice. The first-20-minutes protocol, common mistakes, the take-home checklist, and five principles for responsible use.
  • Appendices. The real artifacts in full — brainstorm reports, design blueprint, code-review and verification reports, and a Windows setup walkthrough.
Built for copy-and-paste. Commands prefixed with $ go in your terminal (without the $); commands prefixed with > go inside a running Claude Code session. Hover any code block and hit Copy.

The talk

The workshops are paired with a research talk — Vibe Researching as Wolf Coming: Can AI Agents with Skills Replace or Augment Social Scientists? Walk through it slide by slide right in your browser — arrow keys to move, an overview grid, and fullscreen.

Resources

Author: Yongjun Zhang (Stony Brook University). If you would like this workshop run for your department or program, feel free to reach out.