Vibe-Coding for Medievalists: How to Use LLMs to Safely and Reliably Accelerate Your Research Workflows

"Vibe-coding", the practice of directing large language models to write, run, and improve code through natural-language instruction rather than active human programming, has moved quickly from a curiosity to a genuinely viable research method. This workshop teaches medievalists, whatever their coding background, how to vibe-code effectively and safely, and to recognise when the technique may give trustworthy results and when it will not.

A central question of responsible use: when can we trust the outputs of vibe-coded tools? The answer is predominantly one of verifiability — tasks with an easily checkable output, such as valid TEI-XML encodings automatically produced from a manual transcription, are far safer territory than tasks whose correctness cannot easily be confirmed. The practical core covers tool and environment selection, precise prompt specification, planning phases, architectural pre-decisions, incremental testing and review, and safe version control — consolidated through a guided project building a simple TEI-encoding web application.