How AI Agents Fit Into Your Research Workflow: Ideas, Experiments, and Paper Writing

In a research internship interview, you are asked how AI agents have changed your research. Describe your current day-to-day research workflow across three activities: coming up with and refining ideas, designing and running experiments, and writing papers. For each activity, explain where agents help you, where you choose not to rely on them, and how you check their output.

Constraints and Clarifications

• Answer from your own practice. If you use agents only a little, or not at all for some activities, say so and explain why.
• Do not claim to know how the prospective team uses automation in its research. Ask instead.
• "Agent" can mean a tool that carries out several steps on its own, such as editing code, running scripts, or searching the literature. It can also mean a chat assistant. Make clear which kind you are describing.

Clarifying Questions

• Does the interviewer mean agents that act on their own, such as running code and launching jobs, or AI assistance of any kind?
• Are there rules in this setting about sending unpublished data, code, or drafts to external AI services?
• Is the interviewer mostly interested in productivity, or in how research quality and correctness are protected?