Arjun Panickssery argues he is skeptical that autonomous AI R&D is as ingenious as claimed, citing side projects where models missed key papers, ran uninformative experiments, pursued trivial philosophy work, and failed to recognize a highly relevant blog post. He also found AI-related hackathon papers were often similar and methodologically incomplete. The notable exception, he suggests, is certain hill-climbing tasks with fast feedback loops, where iterative prompting can yield major improvements.