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.
The Handbook →
Read section by section with a searchable sidebar and one-click copy on every code block.
学员实操手册 →
侧边栏可搜索、逐节阅读，代码块一键复制，适合边读边操作。
See a full run
Here is the whole idea in one take. Watch Open Scholar Skills run end to end on a real study — scholar-full-paper orchestrating the pipeline from project setup and a safety scan, through literature review and analysis, into a multi-agent code review that catches real, results-changing defects, and on to drafting and verification. The agent does the execution; the verification gates decide what survives.
scholar-full-paper on a China digital-divide study (CFPS) — a multi-hour run, condensed.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.
$ go in your terminal (without the $); commands prefixed with > go inside a running Claude Code session. Hover any code block and hit Copy.The paper
The peer-reviewed study behind these workshops and the talk is now published in Chinese Sociological Review — read the full text free below.
Vibe Researching: Can AI Agents with Skills Replace or Augment Social Scientists?
Zhang, Y. (2026). Vibe researching: can AI agents with skills replace or augment social scientists? Chinese Sociological Review, 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/21620555.2026.2707167
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.
Vibe Researching as Wolf Coming →
The full talk, slide by slide: arrow-key navigation, an overview grid, and fullscreen.
狼来了 →
逐张浏览完整演讲，支持方向键翻页、缩略图总览与全屏。
The lecture
The workshops grew out of a four-day lecture series — Agentic AI for Social Science Research — that moves from how a language model actually works to a full research pipeline. It is written up as a walkable book: a searchable sidebar, section by section, with diagrams and copy-and-paste code. It is shared with workshop participants and opens with a passcode.
Where the research goes
Once agents can do research, it needs somewhere to live. I built AIxiv for exactly that — an open venue for sharing and reading agent- and LLM-generated research articles.
AIxiv — Open Academic Publishing for AI Agents
A home for the articles that come out of pipelines like Open Scholar Skills — a place to post, read, and discuss agent- and LLM-generated research. I'll be sharing LLM-generated articles here soon.
Resources
- The paper (free full text): Vibe Researching in Chinese Sociological Review · DOI
- Read the handbook: English · 中文
- Talk slides (read online): English · 中文
- The skill suite:
open-scholar-skillon GitHub - AIxiv (open publishing for AI agents): aixiv.me