Async research projects with coding agents
Asynchronous coding agents are given open research questions, write and run experiments in a dedicated repo, and report findings.
- Agent or tool
- Claude Code
- Topic
- Software Development
- Reported on
- Blog
- Added
- 2026-10-15
Why it matters
Coding agents are moving from autocomplete to doing whole tasks: reading a codebase, making a plan and changing many files. This case is a concrete example of where that works in practice. It is one of 106 sightings filed under Software Development on Agent Sightings (number 75 by interest), and one of 164 involving Claude Code.
How you could try it
Here is a reusable prompt, written by us in our own words, that captures the task. Paste it into Claude Code or any similar agent and adjust the details to your situation.
Investigate whether <library> can do <task>. Write small experiments, run them, and commit a README with findings, code and what didn't work.
Tip: Work on a fresh branch, ask for a plan before edits, and review the diff and test results before merging.
Source
Read the original first-hand account on Blog: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/async-code-research/. Our summary is a paraphrase; details are in the source.
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