Workshop materials for the 2026 Interdisciplinary Science Summit, hosted by Schmidt Sciences and the University of Washington Scientific Software Engineering Center (UW SSEC).
This repository contains the slides, demos, hands-on notebooks, and instructor notes for a ~2-hour workshop teaching scientists how AI coding agents work and how to use them well in research software engineering.
- Make sure your GitHub handle has been added to the team
2026-viss-ai-workshop-participants. - Click Code → Create codespace on main at the top of this repo. The first build takes ~3 minutes.
- When VSCode opens in your browser, wait for
postCreate.shto finish (you'll see a green "Done" line in the terminal). - Open
blocks/01-landscape/demo/notebook.ipynband follow along.
Detailed setup, troubleshooting, and pre-workshop checks are in docs/setup.md.
The workshop is organized into four 30-minute-ish blocks. See docs/workshop-outline.md for the full prose outline.
| # | Block | Folder | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The AI Coding Agent Landscape | blocks/01-landscape/ |
Slides + demo notebook |
| 2 | How It Actually Works (post-training & tool calling) | blocks/02-how-it-works/ |
Slides + model-swap notebook |
| 3 | Agent-Driven Research Software Engineering | blocks/03-research-loop/ |
Slides + live Claude Code demo |
| 4 | Build Your Own Skill (capstone) | blocks/04-build-a-skill/ |
Slides + hands-on chat-mode build |
Each block folder follows the same layout:
blocks/0N-name/
README.md # what this block teaches, learning goals, timing
slides.md # Marp-flavored slides
instructor-notes.md # speaker notes, demo script, fallbacks
resources.md # curated further reading
demo/ # runnable code, starter files, notebooks
- GitHub Copilot in VSCode / Codespaces: the deep-dive tool through Blocks 1, 2, and 4.
- Block 4's capstone uses custom chat modes (
.github/chatmodes/*.chatmode.md); the workshop ships two worked examples in.github/chatmodes/for participants to read and remix.
- Block 4's capstone uses custom chat modes (
- Claude Code VS Code extension + the
rse-pluginsplugin, used in Block 3's live demo to show the structured research-plan-implement workflow. Same Codespace, different chat panel. - Claude (via the workshop's LLM proxy server): the model backend. Copilot, the notebooks, and Claude Code all hit the same proxy. The notebooks use the
litellmPython SDK so the same agent loop also works against any other model the proxy fronts (GPT, Gemini, ...), change one constant. - Python 3.12 +
uv: environment and package management. - Marp: slides as markdown.
You don't need anything installed locally: everything runs in a GitHub Codespace.
- One folder per block, reusable layout.
- All Python work goes through
uv(uv run pytest,uv add <pkg>, etc.). - Notebooks are written to be read top-to-bottom as a teaching document, not just executed.
- Slides are written for the Marp for VS Code extension (preinstalled in the Codespace). Open any
slides.mdand click the preview icon, or runMarp: Export Slide Deck...from the command palette to produce HTML/PDF/PPTX.
VISS members will be available the day after the workshop to help you try the agent on your own data, write your own skills, and explore agentic research workflows. Bring a snippet of code or data you'd like to work on.
Anant Mittal, Carlos García Jurado Suarez, Anshul Tambay, Vani Mandava, Robert Bates, Ryan Hausen, Eric Liu, Tina Dang, Arfon Smith.
- Anshul Tambay, UW SSEC, anshul37@uw.edu
- Tina Dang, Schmidt Sciences, tdang@schmidtsciences.org
MIT, see LICENSE (to be added).