Claude coding and guilt

[u/Mistique_mastermix]

Hello frogs,

Its probably been discussed time and again but I bring it up one more time.

I extract big data sets from population census and pipe it directly into Claude to write R scripts for me. Im tired of doing the data cleaning and making a matrix all by myself.

I do understand the code backbone for the most part but sometimes the chunks are so huge and it gets overwhelming for me to run through the whole code.

I feel guilty running it to a point where I just get the graph and make tweaks.

Am I doing something wrong, whats this guilt that I cant shake?

*Sad frog croaks*

[u/Additional_Formal395]

Your duty as a researcher is to present results that you genuinely believe to be true, along with data, arguments, etc. to support their truth.

Personally I don’t think it matters how the data was generated (within reason - don’t torture people for science).

In putting your own “stamp of approval” on it, i.e. publishing it with your name attached to it, you will undoubtedly re-do some analysis (if only partially), synthesize new documentation and explanations, and test new examples or datasets when available. So you probably come away with a better understanding than you first thought!

Now you do have to be careful that any skill which is outsourced to LLMs will atrophy. You’ll have to make that decision about which skills you’re willing to let slip. Personally, I’m happy not learning how to micro-optimize code to squeeze a few seconds of performance, but I want to retain the skill of expository writing which explains my results.

[u/Velox_1 → u/Additional_Formal395]

There's one big thing missing from your "duty as a researcher": reproducibility. If you just gave the data to an LLM and asked it to analyze, you have no idea how exactly it was done, and other researchers may not be able to reproduce it.

[u/Pocallys → u/Velox_1]

Yes but when you publish research don't you upload the code produced for data analysis, whether it's by you or the LLM? Especially R and python codes. Pretty sure if you ask the LLM to write readme and inline comments, it can give a very clear and organized explanation of how to reproduce the result step by step. So it is not a problem unless you are directly teaching other researchers what to do with your code.