Four months ago, when I applied to the #YC 2026 Summer School, I never imagined I'd be accepted. 🎉 The only thing that pushed me forward was a piece of wisdom I keep coming back to: "Do it first."
One week later, the offer arrived. It's a genuine privilege to join a community of people who share the same passion for building, and to learn firsthand from some of the most influential voices in the AI era, including #JensenHuang, #SamAltman, #PatrickCollison, #JeffDean, and #AlexandrWang.
Rewind to early 2026: I set out to design an AI workflow that could recommend and archive research papers every day. As researchers living through the rise of general AI, we're seeing publication volumes grow to 50x what they were just a few years ago. Top conferences like #CVPR and #NeurIPS have gone from thousands of submissions to more than 30,000. 📑
The bottleneck is no longer keeping up with the latest progress, it's filtering out the noise to surface the most insightful work. That's exactly what #Paperinder is built for. 💡
Over the past four months, #Paperinder has evolved into an agentic system with a purpose-built harness 🤖: a research-specific #Environment, paper-centric #Tools and #Skills, and an abstracted #Constitution that guides every foundation model, from open-source #Qwen to frontier models like #GPT and #Claude.
We never really know how far an idea can go, and I think that's the heart of "Do it first." What began as a personal tool has grown into an agentic system for research work at large.
That journey has led us to launch #LumeLab, our initiative focused on autonomous research. It stands on two legs. The first, #Paperinder, organizes information and helps structure thinking. The second, #Northstar (a name inspired by #FeifeiLi's philosophy on life), is just getting started, designed to take a core idea and then design, run, and analyze experiments in a continuous loop. I believe the autonomous research agent is already on its way.
With gratitude and anticipation, I look forward to meeting and connecting with everyone at the venue this July!
#AIAgents #Startups #YCombinator #Research #26SummerSchool
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