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.

What to bring. Participants need a laptop with access to a coding environment and an integrated agentic LLM. VS Code with GitHub Copilot is recommended, and participants with an institutional affiliation are encouraged to obtain free academic access to GitHub Copilot Pro beforehand (the approval process can take a few days). If you are unfamiliar with this kind of software, don’t worry: get an LLM to talk you through the setup (good practice for the session) and you will learn how to use it on the day.