On Thursday, December 18, Benjamin Golub joined Markus’ Academy for a conversation on “Modern AI for Economics Research: An Overview of Tools.” Benjamin Golub is a professor of economics and computer science at Northwestern University and Co-Founder of refine.ink.
The first part is a tutorial for how to use Cursor, an AI-native environment that bakes LLMs directly into the editing workflow so that models can read your repository, edit multiple files, run “agent” tasks, or explain code in-context
The second part presents Ben Golub and Yann Calvó’s start-up Refine.ink, an AI tool to generate referee-style feedback to academic papers, identifying errors in math and empirical strategy, clarity problems, and consistency issues
The third part walks through some best practices when prompting LLMs. Much of Golub’s advice is also provided by Goldsmith Pinkham (2024)