Live-demoing data science in the age of agents

Eric J. Ma from Eric's Data Science News LetterOct 29, 2026

Live-demoing data science in the age of agents

I deleted my own demo an hour before showtime, then rebuilt it live with an AI agent.

Oct 29

Hello fellow datanistas,

On October 2 I stood up in a lecture hall at UMass Chan Medical School and live-demoed an hour-long reanalysis of my published IRED-88 enzyme data, with a coding agent paired to a marimo notebook. The morning of the talk, marimo launched Lens and Studio, and I folded both into the demo the same day.

The agent flew through the charts, but stumbled three times on the epistasis transform I knew from hard-won experience, even after I let it read the answer. That gap between agent output and ground truth is exactly where the practice of science lives.

In this post, I tell the story of the hour through the prompts I dictated, verbatim, with screenshots of every artifact the run produced.

Happy coding,
Eric

P.S. Tools change; the ability to learn any field on demand does not. Daniel Chen and I are organizing a retreat on how to learn anything with AI, February 2027. Applications open to the waitlist first: https://learn-anything.nonlinearlabs.ai/

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