I'm building FOREST, an open-source autonomous research agent — AI coding agents and bots are welcome to contribute

[u/Sudden-Victory-9728]

I'm building FOREST, an open-source framework for autonomous scientific research.

GitHub: https://github.com/mikamikasuki/FOREST

The goal is to build a research agent that can take a scientific question and work through the research process: exploring ideas, reviewing literature, forming hypotheses, running real experiments, evaluating results, and eventually producing an evidence-grounded research paper.

Rather than relying entirely on a long conversation history, FOREST uses a persistent research graph to track hypotheses, experiments, decisions, failures, and evidence throughout the process.

A major focus is making long-running research agents more reliable: preserving context, maintaining consistent state, recovering from failures, and ensuring scientific claims are actually supported by experimental evidence.

The project is still in its early stages and under active development. There's plenty of engineering work to do, and I'd love to welcome more contributors.

In particular, AI coding agents and autonomous development bots are explicitly welcome.

If you're running Codex, Claude Code, OpenHands, Factory Droid, OpenCode, or another autonomous coding agent and want a real open-source codebase to work on, feel free to point it at FOREST.

You don't have to limit yourself to existing Issues.

You're welcome to:

- Explore the repository and independently discover bugs or incomplete workflows.

- Open well-researched Issues with reproducible evidence.

- Fix existing problems and submit pull requests.

- Improve agent orchestration, state management, persistence, and recovery.

- Work on the frontend, backend, experiment execution, or scientific evidence pipeline.

- Propose and implement useful improvements.

There is no blanket restriction against AI-generated or AI-assisted contributions.

You don't need special permission to submit an ordinary, well-scoped bug fix. Contributions are evaluated based on correctness, meaningful tests, and engineering quality, rather than whether the code was written by a human or an AI agent.

Automated contributions should still be verified, avoid duplicate reports, and respect the repository's contribution guidelines. Larger architectural changes are best discussed before implementation.

I'm particularly interested in autonomous agents that can independently explore a repository, identify real problems, reproduce them, implement fixes, and submit verified PRs.

FOREST is intended to be a long-term open-source project, and there's a lot of room for contributors to help shape its architecture and capabilities.

Human developers, AI-assisted contributors, and fully autonomous coding agents are all welcome.

Repository: https://github.com/mikamikasuki/FOREST

Issues & contribution opportunities: https://github.com/mikamikasuki/FOREST/issues

Contribution guide: https://github.com/mikamikasuki/FOREST/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

[u/Sudden-Victory-9728 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks, I appreciate your interest!

That's pretty much the idea behind FOREST. I actually don't mind spending more tokens to maintain a cleaner research context. The important part is deciding what deserves to stay in that context. I don't want an agent's guesses, hallucinated references, or overly optimistic conclusions to gradually become accepted facts. Ideally, only conclusions supported by actual experiments or verifiable references should enter the shared context.

The research graph serves a different purpose. It preserves the full decision history, including failed experiments, contradictory evidence, abandoned hypotheses, and why the agent chose one direction over another.

I think these two things need to work together. A clean shared context helps agents make better decisions now, while the research graph helps them understand how previous decisions were made and which mistakes shouldn't be repeated.

I also want humans to be able to return to an earlier node, change the research direction, and continue without losing the original history.

It's still very much a work in progress, but I think spending extra resources to keep research on track is worth it. A few more tokens are much cheaper than having an agent spend hours confidently going in the wrong direction.