Engineer uses AI agents to find a forgotten meteorite and lost rhinos in archives

Jesse Waites used Claude Code and a tiered pipeline of AI models to search 4.35 million Dutch East India Company archive pages. A cheap filter model, Jev, screened passages before Claude Haiku read the candidates and checked them against original scans.

The search surfaced a meteorite fall in Maharashtra from 1812, three rhinos sent to Sri Lanka, and three unrecorded eruptions, all pending specialist review.