---
title: "Research-Driven Agents: What Happens When Your Agent Reads Before It Codes"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/research-driven-agents-what-happens-when-your-agent-reads-before-it-codes-tfh78vxgj
source_url: https://blog.skypilot.co/research-driven-agents/
type: article
source: "SkyPilot"
published: 2026-04-09T04:57:03.436Z
updated: 2026-05-14T02:13:01.153Z
tags: ["ai-agents", "llama-cpp"]
reading_time: 16
upvotes: 1
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# Research-Driven Agents: What Happens When Your Agent Reads Before It Codes

**[SkyPilot](https://daily.dev/sources/skypilot)** · 16 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A research-driven approach to AI coding agents is explored by adding a literature search phase to the autoresearch loop before running code experiments. Pointed at llama.cpp's CPU inference path with 4 cloud VMs and Claude Code, the agent first read arxiv papers and studied competing forks (ik_llama.cpp, llamafile) before writing any code. This research phase led to 5 successful optimizations out of 30+ experiments — primarily kernel fusions targeting flash attention's QK tile, RMS norm, and softmax — achieving +15% text generation throughput on x86 and +5% on ARM for TinyLlama 1.1B, at a total cost of ~$29 over ~3 hours. Key insight: code-only agents generate shallow hypotheses when the optimization surface isn't visible in the source; domain knowledge from papers and competing implementations is essential for memory-bound inference workloads.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://blog.skypilot.co/research-driven-agents/>

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---

Tags: [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#llama-cpp](https://daily.dev/tags/llama-cpp)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/research-driven-agents-what-happens-when-your-agent-reads-before-it-codes-tfh78vxgj)