Vibe Researching as Wolf Coming: Can AI Agents with Skills Replace or Augment Social Scientists?
Yongjun Zhang

TL;DR
This paper explores how AI agents with advanced skills can autonomously conduct social science research, potentially augmenting or replacing certain tasks traditionally performed by human social scientists.
Contribution
It introduces the concept of vibe researching, demonstrates a comprehensive AI research pipeline using a 26-skill plugin, and develops a cognitive framework to identify delegation boundaries in research activities.
Findings
AI agents excel at speed and coverage of research tasks.
They struggle with theoretical originality and tacit knowledge.
Potential implications include augmentation risks and pedagogical challenges.
Abstract
AI agents -- systems that execute multi-step reasoning workflows with persistent state, tool access, and specialist skills -- represent a qualitative shift from prior automation technologies in social science. Unlike chatbots that respond to isolated queries, AI agents can now read files, run code, query databases, search the web, and invoke domain-specific skills to execute entire research pipelines autonomously. This paper introduces the concept of vibe researching -- the AI-era parallel to vibe coding -- and uses scholar-skill, a 26-skill plugin for Claude Code covering the full research pipeline from idea to submission across 18 orchestrated phases with 53 quality gates, as an illustrative case. I develop a cognitive task framework that classifies research activities along two dimensions -- codifiability and tacit knowledge requirement -- to identify a delegation boundary that is…
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Taxonomy
TopicsComputational and Text Analysis Methods · Innovative Teaching Methodologies in Social Sciences · Language and cultural evolution
