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I Let AI Agents Train Their Own Models. Here's What Actually Happened. | Hamza Mostafa

hamzamostafa.com · 1,685 words · saved by 1 readers

Two frontier agents, a pile of bugs, and a reality check on the future of autonomous AI research.

All posts TL;DR: I built a system called Tinkerer that lets frontier AI agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) autonomously fine-tune language models — no human in the loop. After 100+ experiments, the best run produced near-perfect arithmetic from a 3B model. The worst runs burned 10+ hours of compute because neither agent noticed a broken learning rate scheduler. My main takeaway: these agents can execute training pipelines, but they can't yet do ML research. Training is execution. Research is judgment. They're good at the first, still developing the second. The Future Everyone Is Talking About

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