16th March 2026 - Link Blog
Coding agents for data analysis. Here's the handout I prepared for my NICAR 2026 workshop "Coding agents for data analysis" - a three hour session aimed at data journalists demonstrating ways that tools like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex can be used to explore, analyze and clean data.
Here's the table of contents:
I ran the workshop using GitHub Codespaces and OpenAI Codex, since it was easy (and inexpensive) to distribute a budget-restricted API key for Codex that attendees could use during the class. Participants ended up burning $23 of Codex tokens.
The exercises all used Python and SQLite and some of them used Datasette.
One highlight of the workshop was when we started running Datasette such that it served static content from a viz/ folder, then had Claude Code start vibe coding new interactive visualizations directly in that folder. Here's a heat map it created for my trees database using Leaflet and Leaflet.heat, source code here.
= 80 THEN 1.0" (query is truncated). A status message reads "Loaded 1,000 rows and plotted 1,000 points as heat map." Below is a Leaflet/OpenStreetMap interactive map of San Francisco showing a heat map overlay of tree locations, with blue/green clusters concentrated in areas like the Richmond District, Sunset District, and other neighborhoods. Map includes zoom controls and a "Leaflet | © OpenStreetMap contributors" attribution.">
I designed the handout to also be useful for people who weren't able to attend the session in person. As is usually the case, material aimed at data journalists is equally applicable to anyone else with data to explore.
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