Episode 9: Mystery Solved!

Episode 9: Mystery Solved!

From The Mixtape with Scott by scott cunningham

May 5, 2026 · 59 min

About this episode

The episode discusses the role of AI Agents in research and the importance of human verification in data analysis.

This week's episode of "The Odd Couple" is just Caitlin and Hannah as I had to go to Georgetown to talk about Claude Code at a faculty retreat. But before we get going with a description, Hannah mentioned at the start during the ice breaker about the opening theme song to the podcast, and for those that don't recognize the lyrics, that's Mac Miller's "Small Worlds" sung by my two nephews. So what is this episode about? One of the themes I have been emphasizing in my talks on AI Agents and my substack is that AI Agents have caused a separation between the historic bundling of the production of research and the verification of the results. Since AI Agents are now able to produce so many aspects of the research project autonomously -- that is without much direction from the human researcher -- one of the new tasks of the researcher is to verify them. If you remember from a few weeks ago, Claude Code had nearly instantly worked up the county-level marriage data into a county panel of marriage rates and marriage counts by year. We brought Hannah Sayre, a recent college graduate and current economic consultant, into the project to help us work through the latter task of "human…

People in this episode

Host: Scott Cunningham

Guests: Caitlin, Hannah, Hannah Sayre

Topics covered

  • AI Agents
  • research verification
  • data analysis
  • economic consulting
  • human verification

Keywords

  • AI Agents
  • research
  • verification
  • data analysis
  • economic consulting
  • Claude Code
  • Hannah Sayre

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Georgetown

Books & works: Small Worlds

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