Ars Inquirendi

Ars Inquirendi 2026 · your paper

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

Sebastian Dows-Miller (University College London)

Your slot

Strand

Vibe-Coding for Medievalists

Day

Day 2 · Saturday 21 November 2026

Part

Morning — exact times to follow

Role

Workshop

Participation

In person

Abstract

"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.

What to bring. Please complete the following setup beforehand. If you’re unsure about any step, ask an LLM to talk you through it (good practice for our session!) or get in touch with me.

  1. Create a free GitHub account, if you don’t already have one.
  2. Install the following software:
    • Python (version 3.11 or later; on Windows, tick “Add python.exe to PATH” during installation)
    • GitHub Desktop (sign in with your GitHub account)
    • VS Code (latest version), with the Python and GitHub Copilot extensions
  3. Get access to GitHub Copilot, the AI coding assistant we’ll use inside VS Code. Participants with institutional affiliation can apply for free Copilot Pro through GitHub Education – approval can take several days, so please apply at least a week in advance. Otherwise, the free Copilot tier is sufficient to follow along.
  4. Clone the session repository. In GitHub Desktop, choose File > Clone repository > URL, and enter https://github.com/dowsmiller/vibecoding (don’t just go to this link).
  5. Check your setup by following the instructions in the repository’s README file. If anything fails, try to troubleshoot using LLM assistance, or contact me before the session.

Subjects

Education & trainingMethod: falsification & agentic inference

What we need from you

How the conference works

All talks except the live keynotes are pre-recorded and released a week ahead of the conference, by 13 November 2026.

The live sessions are discussions of the pre-recorded talks, held in the room at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and online.

Speakers do not register or pay.

Invitation or visa letters, and accommodation questions: write to arsinquirendi@gmail.com.