Dr. Claw: An AI Scientist Workspace for Vibe Research

We present Claw AI Lab, a lab-native autonomous research platform that advances automated research from a hidden prompt-to-paper pipeline into an interactive AI laboratory. Rather than centering the system around a single agent or a fixed serial workflow, we allow users to instantiate a full research team from one prompt, with customizable roles, collaborative workflows, real-time monitoring, artifact inspection, and rollback/resume control through a unified dashboard. The platform also supports distinct research modes for exploration, multi-agent discussion, and reproduction, making autonomous research substantially more steerable and laboratory-like in practice. A key practical contribution of Claw AI Lab lies in its Claw-Code Harness, which connects local codebases, datasets, and checkpoints to runnable experiments and feeds execution artifacts back into the research loop. As a result, the harness improves not only execution integration, but also experimental completion and result integrity: experiments are easier to inspect, iterate on, and faithfully transfer into final papers, reducing common failure modes such as partial runs and malformed result reporting. In our internal evaluation on five AI research case studies, using AutoResearchClaw as the baseline, Claw AI Lab is consistently preferred by AI expert judges on idea novelty, experiment completeness, and paper presentation quality. We view Claw AI Lab as an early step toward a new paradigm: autonomous research as usable, interactive, and reliability-aware scientific infrastructure.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have significantly improved coding and programming workflows. Claude Code, in particular, is one of the most powerful LLM coding agents and is capable of conducting complex coding tasks. However, several drawbacks can undermine long-term agentic workflows. (1) Irrecoverable agent teams: The Agent Teams feature is powerful, but the working state accumulated by each teammate is lost and cannot be resumed once the process stops, for example, when a terminal is closed. (2) Compaction erodes working detail: Compaction condenses the conversation into a summary, causing an agent's working details to become vague. (3) Agentic "technical debt": Over time, a user's decisions and the agents' operations become trapped in compacted old chats, making the project increasingly difficult to maintain and review. (4) Heavy prompt writing: Assigning or handing off tasks requires users to repeatedly write long prompts to achieve the expected agentic performance. We propose ATWZ (Agent Team Work Zone), a filesystem-based operations layer built around Claude Code's native Agent Teams that addresses these problems. Its central design principle is to treat each agent and teammate as a human employee and preserve their important working state in files stored in a dedicated directory called a "workstation," together with the skills, hooks, and scripts that use and maintain these files. With ATWZ, an agent team can periodically back up its working state, allowing an agent's knowledge to be recovered after compaction. After a process ends, the team can be restored with a single command. These features also substantially mitigate the agentic "technical debt" described above. Moreover, within ATWZ, agent "employees" can send documents to one another, greatly reducing the effort required to write prompts.

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.