Last month I was going through data from NASA's TESS telescope with Claude Code when one star started looking weird.

https://preview.redd.it/zwekq4q0m1uh1.jpg?width=1728&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a396c3354234ae957337b4e9df3fa7578f85e1ce

It's about 116 light-years away, and every 3.18 days it gets about 0.05% dimmer for roughly two hours.

I first saw it in data from late 2025. So I went backwards.

The same dip is there in completely separate TESS observations from 2020.

Then 2018.

If it's a planet, it's about 1.4× the size of Earth.

To be clear: this is still a planet candidate, not a confirmed planet.

The part that might be interesting to this subreddit is how I did the analysis.

I used Claude Code with Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 for most of the actual work: downloading and parsing the TESS data, writing the search code, fitting the transits, checking nearby stars, looking for secondary eclipses and other false positives, generating plots, and rerunning things when a test failed.

I chose what questions to ask, what tests mattered, and what counted as pass/fail.

Independent reviews came from Codex and from separate agent sessions that started fresh, with read-only access.

In about two weeks this turned into 74 separate analyses and 1,000+ scripts.

And I learned pretty quickly that the useful way to use an agent for science isn't to ask:

"Is this a planet?"

It's to keep giving it ways to prove that it isn't.

My favorite test was simple.

I hid one entire year of observations, used the other two years to calculate the orbit, and predicted where the transits in the hidden year should be. Then I checked the hidden year only at those times.

I did that three times.

2018 → predicted.
2020 → predicted.
2025 → predicted.

3 out of 3.

https://preview.redd.it/jr67x1wfk1uh1.png?width=3200&format=png&auto=webp&s=8aaffa39f0b634d0a8960ec79bae2a3b49b3e970

The audits also caught actual mistakes.

At one point I had a statistical claim that looked stronger than it really was. An audit found the problem, so I removed the claim and redid that part of the analysis.

The main 3.18-day signal survived.

I also wanted to know whether somebody had already found it.

So I searched 36 catalogs and literature sources and 340,505 automatic TESS planet-search alerts.

I couldn't find either signal reported.

There may be a second candidate around the same star, roughly 2.2 Earth radii on an 11.13-day orbit. The evidence for that one is much weaker, so I'm treating it separately.

And now comes the part I proud of.

TESS comes back to this part of the sky in November. I submitted an observing proposal asking it to record this star every 2 minutes while it's there.

It was approved. Program #100.

https://preview.redd.it/3848thnhk1uh1.png?width=3200&format=png&auto=webp&s=8ccb19f98b5a3f9a2b0ea199c942b33df4b6030f

TESS observes it again from October 31 to November 26.

On October 6, before any of that new data exists, I published the exact times the transits should happen and the rules for deciding whether the prediction passes or fails.

So this is now falsifiable in a very literal way.

If the dips appear when predicted, the case gets much stronger.

If they don't, that counts against it, and the preregistration makes that impossible to quietly rewrite afterward.

I also built a little free interactive 3D version of the system if you want to fly around it:

https://tic4206066.pages.dev

Preprint:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22967456

Predictions published before the new TESS data:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23175179

TESS DDT program list:

https://tess.mit.edu/science/ddt/

Has anyone else here used Claude Code for actual research rather than software development?

I'd especially love to hear how you're auditing agent-written analysis when a result can look completely convincing and still be wrong.

You might witness a revolution in medicine and technology that completely changes what it means to be human. Diseases that are considered incurable today could become treatable. AI could accelerate drug discovery, gene therapy, organ regeneration, personalized medicine, and treatments that slow down or even reverse aging.

You'll be living in a world where damaged organs can be grown or regenerated, where cancer becomes something doctors can routinely treat, where AI can design personalized treatments specifically for your body, and where aging itself starts becoming something we can actually intervene in.

And who knows, maybe we will see the first serious breakthroughs toward radical life extension and eventually something that sounds almost like immortality today.

The next 5 to 10 years could be absolutely insane. AI is advancing faster than most people realize, and it is starting to accelerate progress in science, medicine, robotics, materials, and countless other fields. Things that sound like science fiction today could become normal technology within our lifetime.

So if you're struggling right now, just hold on. You might be much closer to the future than you think.

Stay alive long enough to see what happens. You don't want to miss the future.

For a while, those hoping to avoid the difficulty and expense of dealing with Adobe’s Creative Suite have been able to use several free and/or open-source alternatives that replicate some or all of those capabilities. Now, one developer is using AI-powered reverse engineering to mimic the look, feel, and functionality of Adobe’s well-known software with what he hopes will soon be perfect fidelity.

Artcraft got its start last year as a “controllable AI for artists” that allows for precise post-generation editing of AI-crafted images and videos. Over the weekend, though, the brand debuted its pivot to a suite of seven open source apps recreating the user interface and tools found in Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.

The OpenAI math drop reactions from mathematicians range from denial, to doom, to “Our job is now to interpret results, AI will never come up with novel questions.” The vast majority of SWEs who have been forced to adopt AI now see themselves as systems level thinkers and planners orchestrating agent swarms. These are smart people, right? Can’t they see the obvious next steps on the curve we are on? Why does it seem like they can’t see past the tip of their nose?

AI is so good at finding patterns, connecting dots etc. and it can literally be superhuman at that. Practicing medicine is literally just about taking in the patients conditions, reports etc. and producing a diagnosis. The thing is medical knowledge isn’t just about reading books as experience is also very important as there are so many variations of cases and outcomes that the book won’t tell you about or may even go against the book in some cases, so you can’t just have current LLMs as a doctor, you need to explicitly train it on a bunch of patient data that replicates the experience of doctors. Patient data is also in natural language so we can do that with LLMs today. Doctors only gain experience from thousands of cases but we can probably pass millions to billions of cases and outcomes to train an LLM to be superhuman at diagnosis. Could you imagine how helpful this would be, it would save people so much time and money considering how expensive healthcare is in America but also lives as sometimes doctors get it wrong or they make you do tons of unnecessary tests that give your family so much stress. We literally have the technology to make superhuman doctors, at least for consulting, we only need the data.

But unfortunately that’s the problem as medical data is so highly protected by law and under so many privacy constraints and also very distributed amongst millions of hospitals that it’s pretty much impossible to get your hands on billions of patient records.

This is so annoying since we could literally save millions to billions of lives and essentially solve medicine but stupid bureaucracy is in the way and no doubt the Luddites will complain that we’re stealing all their medical records and spying on them or some BS.

There has been a huge leap in emulation for PS4 and PS5 games recently, thanks to AI. Suddenly, places that hated ai for stealing love it when it's being used for emulators (despite emulators mainly being used for playing console games for free on PC).

I also know someone who used to do expensive art commissions of his oc characters. He was uninterested in AI until recently and now loves it and uses chatgpt's image generator to make his own art without having to pay high prices aside from the subscription.

r/singularity is also less negative towards ai.

Have you noticed an overall increase in pro-ai sentiment?

It costs 75% less than 4.5 (though let's be real, no one used 4.5 for anything)