Most “autonomous AI research” demos look impressive for the same reason magic tricks do: you only see the interesting part. An agent edits some code, runs an experiment, and shows a better result. What you usually do not see is the part that actually determines whether the system is useful: what is the harness optimizing for, how stable is the evaluation, and what happens when the agent fails? That is why Karpathy’s Autoresearch is worth paying attention to.