Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Coding has long been a skill journalists wanted to learn to make their investigations more efficient and rigorous. The main barrier was the significant time investment required to develop that skill. But since large language models emerged, we no longer need to write code ourselves. We do, however, still need to make informed choices when instructing an LLM to write code for us. Otherwise, those choices get made for us by the model.

How do we instruct the LLM best? How can we understand a code? And how do we catch potential mistakes? No prior coding knowledge is required to attend this session. You'll learn a simple, systematic approach to conversations, context management, and effective prompting that will help you to code anything. The participants should have an account with a large language model provider (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or similar).