Here's proof that Claude Code can write an entire empirical polisci paper. To validate my claim that AI agents are coming for polisci "like a freight train", today I had Claude Code fully replicate and extend an old paper of mine estimating the effect of universal vote-by-mail on turnout and election outcome...essentially in one shot. After careful prompting, Claude Code: (1) Downloaded the old paper's repo and replicated the past results, translating our old Stata Code into Python (2) Crawled the web to get updated official election data and census data (3) Ran new analyses extending the results through 2024 (4) Created new tables and figures (5) Performed a lit review (6) Wrote a wholly new paper (7) Pushed the whole thing to a new github repo The whole thing took about an hour. This is an insane paradigm shift in how empirical work is done. It also validates the point that several people including @BrendanNyhan made yesterday---it's going to be especially easy to scale observational research with AI. Thanks to @alexolegimas, @arthur_spirling , and many others who gave me feedback. .