I’ve released a new online book, AI Assistants for Scientific Coding. It’s a practical guide to using language models to support scientific computing and analysis.
The book focuses on helping people who already use R or Python for data analysis. It’s not an introduction to programming; instead, it shows how to work with AI tools effectively and responsibly once you know the basics.
What you’ll find inside:
- Choosing and using AI coding assistants, from simple chat tools to agents that can run and test code
- Prompting strategies that improve reliability for real analysis tasks
- Examples from environmental science (GLMs, multivariate stats), with methods general to other fields
- Notes on ethics, copyright, costs, and environmental impacts
Read it here: https://www.seascapemodels.org/AI-assistants-for-scientific-coding/
The material also serves as reference notes for a one‑day workshop and will evolve as the field changes. If you’re interested in the prompting side of statistical workflows, there’s an accompanying preprint: https://doi.org/10.32942/X2CS80