How to Build an AI Research Agent That Works While You Sleep (Karpathy's Autoresearch Method)

In January 2025, Andrej Karpathy shared a concept that quietly changed how serious practitioners think about AI-assisted work: autoresearch. The idea is deceptively simple — instead of using an AI agent for one-shot tasks, you set up a loop where the agent autonomously runs experiments, evaluates results, keeps what works, discards what doesn't, and iterates. Over and over. While you sleep. This isn't theoretical anymore. In early 2026, ARK Invest's research showed that AI coding agents can now work reliably and autonomously for 55+ minutes before needing human intervention. That's enough time for dozens of experiment-evaluate-iterate cycles. The autoresearch pattern has gone from interesting idea to practical workflow. In this tutorial, we'll build an autonomous research loop from scratch. You'll learn the core pattern, see three real use cases, and walk away with a working setup you can adapt to your own projects. The Autoresearch Pattern: Experiment → Evaluate → Keep/Discard → Itera