Claude-shaped science

Summary: In this guest post, Prof. Matthew Schwartz returns to describe a new approach to AI-accelerated science. In Vibe Physics , Schwartz discussed similarities in capability between Claude and a physics graduate student. Here, he describes what happened when he stopped fighting Claude and allowed Claude to find “Claude-shaped” problems: ones best suited to the capabilities of the current generation of LLM tools. This led him to build BootLoops, a toolkit for exact calculations in quantitative science. Because similar calculations often turn up across very disparate areas of science, Claude found connections to ecology, population genetics, and a dozen other fields. These connections were often technically correct but scientifically unremarkable at first, so Schwartz worked with domain experts to steer BootLoops toward questions those fields care about. Below, we share more about these projects and how BootLoops came about.

Agentic AI is improving rapidly. Everyone notices the models seem smarter: they know more, make fewer mistakes, and have better ideas. If you follow the trend lines, it is easy to speak confidently about the potential of AI to revolutionize science. However, academic scientists trying to use the models today in their own work often feel a disconnect. The models may be solving challenging and longstanding problems , but so far these have mostly been well-scoped applications of existing techniques. Many of the headlines seem to be in mathematics, the one part of science where a problem can be stated completely and an answer checked absolutely. But most of science is not like that. And for many of us researchers and students, the distance between those headlines and what happens when we use these models can leave us frustrated and anxious.

The core conflict, as I see it, is that although these models are brilliant, working like a human scientist is not what current LLMs do best. Claude and GPT are good at science, but they are not scientists : yes, they are smart, but it can take a lot of hand-holding to get them to produce anything of scientific value. Physicists would call this an “impedance mismatch”: two systems that each work fine but are poorly matched, so most of what one puts in never gets through to the other. Here, the mismatch is between what scientists want and what AI does well.

I started looking for examples where the impedance mismatches are less acute. I began by having Claude build an accessible suite of tools for mathematical physics. Before long, the tools found uses for other problems. This iterative process generated a set of software and scientific protocols, which I call BootLoops. BootLoops functions as a kind of harness for the LLM, much like Claude Code or Claude Science is a harness for Claude, or Codex is a harness for GPT. I’ve found BootLoops especially well-suited for a class of quantitative problems in science. It is also open-source, so it can be used with whatever model you like.

Once Claude had BootLoops, it kept noticing the same pattern: many fields have problems that a technique from mathematics, physics, or computer science would solve outright if anyone knew it existed. I started calling these “Claude-shaped” problems, and followed them outside high-energy theoretical physics—my home turf—into geology, biology, economics, and linguistics. In these other areas, I could not rely on my own expertise to know whether what Claude found was interesting. So I found some experts and asked. With their guidance, BootLoops was able to make substantive advances in many research areas.

Below, I share how BootLoops came about, describe some early findings in areas where I have been applying it, and share some of my thinking on how to resolve the impedance mismatch between human and AI scientists today.