SwiftNJ: Fast Exact Neighbour Joining via Correctness-Gated Coding Agents (opens in new tab)

The capability profile of frontier coding agents in 2026 varies sharply across technical domains, motivating domain-specific empirical study of where, and under what oversight conditions, such systems can contribute to specialised technical work. This paper presents one such study in computational phylogenetics. Neighbour joining (NJ) is a widely used distance-based method for inferring evolutionary trees in microbial epidemiology, comparative genomics, and large-scale sequence clustering. It...