All recipes

The Comment "Delegate what you can check: ten lessons on AI agents in research" distils what about 30 group leaders at the Helmholtz Munich Computational Health Center learned from a year of using agents. Each of its points is written up here as a recipe, with the steps, how to check the output and the errors reported so far. The list grows as other groups add recipes. The recipes follow the order in which a group meets them: preparing for agents, thinking with them and implementing with them.

Prepare for agents

Recipe 1Make your materials accessible to agentsTry this: Keep specifications, meeting notes, designs and reusable skills as plain text where agents can read them. Recipe 2Establish agent guardrailsTry this: Limit agents to listed folders and minimal rights, and approve every email or form before it goes out. Recipe 3Learn from your peersTry this: Hold a show-and-tell, then pair your most experienced users with your least experienced.

Think with agents

Recipe 4Turn your field's literature into data, and into a sparring partnerTry this: Load your field's papers and your newest results into one workspace, and ask for a source behind every answer. Recipe 5Prototype an idea before you hand it to a studentTry this: Ask an agent to grill the project plan and build a minimal prototype on data you already have.

Implement with agents

Recipe 6Let the cost of checking decide how much freedom an agent getsTry this: Start with tasks a machine can check, such as tests that must pass or numbers that must match. Recipe 7Turn open questions into checkable problemsTry this: Before any automated search, fix a metric, a baseline and at least three datasets. Recipe 8Pin down the method before the agent starts, and watch for driftTry this: Write the specification, including the evaluation, before any code, and have a second person read the evaluation code. Recipe 9Write, review and teach from your own notesTry this: Let the agent work from your bullet points and earlier texts, and have students do tasks they have not mastered by hand first. Recipe 10Automate the paperwork you control, and build interfaces to the restTry this: Automate your own forms and reports first, then give agents read access to finance, personnel and grant systems where the rules allow.

The rule behind them

Hand agents the work whose results can be checked cheaply, and put effort into making more of your research checkable. Delegate by verifiability explains the rule. Some work stays with people even when checking is cheap: see Where to draw the line.

Tried a recipe?

Each recipe has a discussion thread at the bottom. An example from a second group changes a recipe's status from tried to reproduced. See Contribute.