We are please to announce the following key note by Markus Kreft from Agentic Systems Lab during the Swiss RSE day on 31 August 2026:
Research Context Engineering - Agentic Development in RSE
LLM-based coding agents have proven to be powerful tools for software development. While trend-driven approaches like “vibe coding” empower users with little to no programming experience to build surprisingly complex systems, they come with severe limitations regarding code quality, reproducibility, and long-term maintainability.
Solely relying on AI leads to a massive accumulation of “cognitive debt”, where developers gain initial speed but lose fundamental understanding of their own codebases. The emerging practice of agentic development attempts to bring the raw utility of coding agents into the rigorous, systematic workflows required by the software engineering discipline.
This talk explores how to bridge that gap in the field of Research Software Engineering. I will examine what makes the research use case fundamentally unique compared to traditional software engineering, and why guiding an AI means treating everything, from prompting to system architecture, as a context engineering problem.
Drawing on real-world heuristics, the presentation will offer pragmatic advice on when to heavily leverage agents for surgical edits or isolated projects, and when to avoid them and rely on the highly efficient expressiveness of programming languages. Finally, I will anticipate how this paradigm shift will evolve the RSE discipline, transforming daily workflows from focusing on API details and syntax to architecting robust, scientifically valid systems.