Vibe Researching as Wolf Coming: Can AI Agents with Skills Replace or Augment Social Scientists?

ArXi:2602.22401v3 Announce Type: replace AI agents -- systems that execute multi-step reasoning workflows with persistent state, tool access, and specialist skills -- represent a qualitative shift from prior automation technologies in social science. Unlike chatbots that respond to isolated queries, AI agents can now read files, run code, query databases, search the web, and invoke domain-specific skills to execute entire research pipelines autonomously. This paper