alt Hacker NewsA lot of the soft and hard sciences use hacky matplotlib code to produce results and visualisation, without being necessarily data science
From the bits I've seen, I'd take claude-generated code any time over that written by maths, physics, biology, linguistics people. Even though I've seen Claude make some super-big mistakes while doing data analysis I'd guess it's already more reliable than most academics trying to code.
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This 100000x over. Nothing is worse than trying to productionize code coming from academics like this.
Conveniently, you can use published results as tests of equivalence, provide the ugly code as context, and regenerate it to your liking. I think the odds of such a regeneration introducing a bug that's within the usage domain but that dodges the golden tests are quite low... so long as you resist the urge to add features along the way.
I think presentation via software just isn't a lot of their strong suits. A lot of researchers' personal or research lab sites too are usually way out of date or just really badly presented from what I've seen. They could all do with some thinking about aesthetics and understandability more.