I don't know if it's the first and it certainly isn't state of the art at this point but I think karpathy/autoresearch is a quintessential starting point. TBF

I don't know if it's the first and it certainly isn't state of the art at this point but I think karpathy/autoresearch is a quintessential starting point. TBF as an earlier commenter noted it's "just" superoptimization using an LLM as the proposer so there's a lot of relevant prior art.