Dean Ball: Pooling Coding Agent Compute Could Automate Science
deanwball · x · 2026-08-08
Dean Ball proposes a vision for the future of scientific research: if current subscribers of Codex and Claude Code donated a tiny fraction of their monthly compute, it would be enough to automate much of the data-science work currently done by human astrophysicists.
As sciences like astrophysics become information sciences, government and philanthropic funding should pivot to building expensive physical instruments (like telescopes) for data collection. Meanwhile, compute-heavy research can be crowdsourced via shared agent compute pools. If the resulting data and research are made public, it could serve as a global commons. Ultimately, a growing fraction of scientific experiments will be automated, making scientific exploration nearly autonomous and virtually free.
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