On Accelerating Grounded Code Development for Research

Scientific code repositories encode decades of human knowledge in executable models, methods, and tools. Yet fragmented toolchains, implicit domain conventions, and specialized correctness criteria make this knowledge difficult to convert into reliable learning experience-a challenge we call the scientific experience bottleneck. We introduce ScienceIDE, infrastructure for turning the world's scientific code into programmable environments for scientific agents. Guided by expert-defined scientific cases and acceptance criteria, agents transform repositories into executable environments that support task generation, execution, and scientific verification. These environments provide a shared foundation for supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and evaluation. Using verified interaction trajectories, we train PhAI-IDE-72B, PhAI-IDE-9B, and PhAI-IDE-4B. The model family shows gains in held-out scientific-code repair and across selected general-purpose benchmarks in code, reasoning, and knowledge, providing evidence of positive transfer from scientific experience to broader capabilities. ScienceIDE lays the foundation for an integrated workspace for agent learning and scientific practice, making humanity's scientific software a shared substrate for developing scientific intelligence. Code: https://github.com/aitofound/ScienceIDE

We introduce NatureBench, a cross-discipline benchmark of 90 tasks distilled from peer-reviewed Nature-family publications, designed to evaluate whether AI coding agents can move beyond reproduction toward discovery on real scientific problems. NatureBench is built on NatureGym, an automated pipeline that constructs a standardized, per-task containerized environment from a source paper, addressing the environment-fragmentation problem that has limited the credibility of prior agent-on-research benchmarks. Evaluating ten frontier agent configurations under a strict web-search-disabled protocol, we find that the strongest model surpasses SOTA on only 17.8% of tasks under the g>0.1 criterion. Analysis of method pathways reveals that agents succeed primarily through methodological translation, converting scientific tasks into familiar supervised prediction problems, rather than through genuine scientific invention. Failures are dominated by wrong method choice and insufficient compute budget, not by task misunderstanding. We release the benchmark, the NatureGym pipeline, and a public leaderboard with maintainer-side reproduction. Code: https://github.com/FrontisAI/NatureBench

AI coding agents are increasingly used for scientific work, but their end-to-end autonomous research capability remains difficult to verify. We present ResearchClawBench, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous scientific research across 40 tasks from 10 scientific domains. Each task is grounded in a real published paper, provides related literature and raw data, and hides the target paper during evaluation. Expert-curated multimodal rubrics decompose the target scientific artifacts into weighted criteria, enabling evaluation of target-paper-level re-discovery while leaving room for new discovery. We evaluate seven autonomous research (auto-research) agents under a unified protocol and seventeen native LLMs through the lightweight ResearchHarness. Current systems remain far from reliable re-discovery: the strongest autonomous agent, Claude Code, averages 21.5, and the strongest ResearchHarness LLM, Claude-Opus-4.7, averages 20.7, with an LLM frontier mean of only 26.5. Error analysis shows that failures concentrate in experimental protocol mismatch, evidence mismatch, and missing scientific core. ResearchClawBench provides a reproducible evaluation frontier for measuring progress toward autonomous scientific research.