Physics Is All You Need? A Case Study in Physicist-Supervised AI Development of Scientific Software

ArXi:2605.30353v1 Announce Type: new Are AI agents tools, co-authors, or researchers? We present a quantified ($N=1$): a physicist supervising an AI coding agent (Claude Code, Sonnet and Opus models) over 12 work days and 57 sessions to build CLAX-PT, a differentiable one-loop perturbation theory module in JAX. We documented and classified 15 supervision events by intervention level. The agent resolved ten autonomously by iterating against oracle tests. Two by the physicist's domain knowledge.