Responsible AI: Getting Set Up — Environments, Tools, and Avoiding Lock-In

In this session, we'll cover how to set up a research computing environment using VS Code, Claude Code, and other agentic coding tools. We'll also work through the habits that outlast any single tool: keeping an engineering mindset that avoids vendor lock-in, staying in your own environment rather than copy-pasting between a chat window and your terminal, and knowing when to follow a tutorial and when to ask an AI assistant for help.

Participants will come away with a working, flexible AI coding environment ready for the rest of the series, and a set of habits for evaluating tools and asking good questions — rather than a one-time setup checklist that quickly becomes stale as tools change.