Autoresearch, Claude and Constrained Optimization

IntroductionYou don't need to look far to find claims that folks have been using AI to do the work of dozens of people. I tend to be skeptical of any claim that discusses improvements without evidence. I decided to take that skepticism and put it to work. This had a minor overlap with the whole 'loops' discussion on X but that's coincidental.Over the last few weeks I have put together a project in the theme of Kaparthay's 'Autoresearch'. I wanted to choose a problem that was not a traditional machine learning or numerical optimization problem but one that still had some objective measure of success.I chose this kind of problem because many of the projects or products I have worked on are structured that way. You have some metric that you want to change (up or down) and ideally some way to measure it. You likely also have some constraints e.g. we can't let the page load time exceed 500ms for this feature.I have yet to work on a problem like this where the path from unknown to success…