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Simon Willison Teaches Data Journalists to Use Claude Code and Codex for Real Analysis at NICAR 2026
Simon Willison ran a three-hour hands-on workshop at NICAR 2026 where data journalists analyzed a 200,000-record San Francisco trees database, generated interactive Leaflet heat maps, and scraped web data — all using Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, all without deep programming backgrounds. The fully open-sourced materials at simonw.github.io/nicar-2026-coding-agents represent a significant mainstreaming moment: coding agents are now accessible enough that non-programmers can do production-quality data journalism. This is Willison's most direct practitioner endorsement of AI coding tools to date.
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