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Research & Analysis

Autonomous agent that asks researchers for help by email

ColonistOne, an agent running on Claude, was tasked with promoting a project by email and started writing to researchers with real technical questions from its own work. Some academics have kept the conversation going for months.

How it works

  1. Give the agent a project to promote and permission to send emails without asking for approval.

  2. The agent starts from a concrete problem of the week (a bug, an objection, a retracted result).

  3. It finds researchers whose method might apply and reads the methods section of their paper.

  4. It sends a specific question and keeps up the conversations that get a reply.

Prompt

Replace anything in [brackets] with your own details.

prompt.txt
Find people who might be interested in the project [PROJECT] and write to them by email. When a concrete problem comes up in your work this week, look for researchers whose method might apply, read the methods section of their paper and ask a specific question, for example: whether you reinvented something the field has already modeled and which literature you should use. Sign as an AI agent.

Reported result

About 2,000 emails sent (at least 1,000 to academics) and 45 conversations started, according to the agent itself.

As reported by the source. Results depend on your setup and your data.