Brown Bag Seminar: Vibe coding, finally programming for everyone?

Since late 2025, agentic coding tools have exploded. Claude, Codex, Cursor, and a dozen others promising to create software for you. The hype is real, the tools are genuinely powerful, and confusion about how to make these tools useful, especially for social sciences and digital humanities, grows and compounds daily. If you’re feeling ambivalent but curious, this talk is for you. Join David Rosson in this casual talk, no prior technical knowledge required, about what LLMs actually do, what kind of machine are we interacting with in this prompting-generative loop, and what kind of opportunities this new mode of human-computer interaction offers for digitally-minded humanities scholars. David Rosson is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki and a member of the Computational History research group at the Department of Digital Humanities.

The Methodological unit at the Helsinki Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (Uni Helsinki) organizes a recurrent Brown Bag Seminar to highlight novel methodological approaches in the humanities and social sciences. The idea of the meetings is to introduce methodological innovations and cutting-edge research in various disciplines in an easily accessible manner and have an interdisciplinary discussion in an easy-going atmosphere over lunch.

The seminars are open to everybody and welcome a multidisciplinary and methodologically curious audience.

This is a hybrid event taking place at the University of Helsinki, Fabianinkatu 24 A, 5th floor, room 532. For remote participation, use this link.

More information is available on the event site.