My bet: in the near future, 80%⬆️ of CS research will be done by AI in collaboration with humans. However, today's research ecosystem is still built around the human, not the AI scientist.
For example, the 8-page paper PDF is a lossy compression of months of branching exploration into a linear story, optimized for a human reviewer to skim in 30 minutes. It hides two structural taxes:
📖 Storytelling Tax — failures, rejected hypotheses, and dead ends get stripped. On RE-Bench (24,008 runs, 21 frontier models), failed runs = 90.2% of total compute cost, with a 113× median failed-to-success token ratio. Every lab independently rediscovers the same dead ends.
🔧 Engineering Tax — the gap between reviewer-sufficient prose and agent-sufficient spec. Across 8,921 PaperBench requirements (23 ICML'24 papers), only 45.4% are fully specified in the PDF. The rest is tacit lab knowledge. Tolerable when readers were human. Critical now that agents read, reproduce, and extend.
We propose ARA: the Agent-Native Research Artifact — replace the narrative PDF with an agent-executable package, in 4 layers:
🧠 structured scientific logic
⚙️ executable code w/ full specs
🌳 exploration graph (every failure preserved)
📊 evidence grounding every claim