Dear all,
Just like in the last years, in 2026, AiiDA is again participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program under the NumFocus umbrella.
As you can see in the GSoC timeline excerpt below, we will ourselves only find out whether we receive any student slots for GSoC after the accepted mentoring organizations are announced (19th of Feb). Hence, at this moment, we cannot really provide any guarantee that we will be able to secure a slot.
Still, this thread here is for any discussions leading up to GSOC 2026. If you’re interested in working on AiiDA as a student, use it to say hi and ask any questions you may have. Please also see the NumFOCUS guide for GSOC contributors. We will also provide further updates here.
This year, we have one (quite explorative) project proposal: implementing a natural language interface for AiiDA using multi-agent AI. If the project description reads interesting to you, and you feel that you bring the required skills to the table, please voice your interest here. We would be very excited to work with contributors from whom we can learn ourselves about LLMs, agents, MCP, RAG, and other AI-related topics 
One thing we would like to mention is that we have realized that the number of contributions on GitHub usually spikes in the months leading up to GSoC. We also have the gut feeling that many of the PRs appearing in that time are created without the necessary effort and care required for a large code base such as AiiDA. Frequently, tests, continuous integration (CI), documentation builds, or other pipelines start failing, and we have to walk contributors through fixing those issues.
While we are, of course, thankful about community interest and external contributions, we currently don’t really have the human resources to go through this process, as proper review of PRs takes significant time. This is especially relevant with modern AI tools, in which large changes to the code base can be achieved with just a few prompts, and the actual work comes from reviewing (and fixing) the LLM-generated code, as well as verifying its downstream effects.
Hence, we discourage minor contributions that are not bug fixes or improvements that come from actual usage of AiiDA. In addition, having provided minor contributions to the code base is not a requirement to be considered for GSoC anymore. We have removed the corresponding statement from our past GSoC project pages.
For the application process, we would much prefer familiarity with the codebase, its architecture, and ideally a well-thought-out preliminary architectural design plan for the proposed project.
Thanks,
The AiiDA team
Here is the relevant excerpt from the GSOC 2026 timeline:
January 19 - 18:00 UTC
- Mentoring organizations can begin submitting applications to Google
February 3 - 18:00 UTC
- Mentoring organization application deadline
February 3 - 18
- Google program administrators review organization applications
February 19 - 18:00 UTC
- List of accepted mentoring organizations published
February 19 - March 15
- Potential GSoC contributors discuss application ideas with mentoring organizations
March 16 - 18:00 UTC
- GSoC contributor application period begins
March 31 - 18:00 UTC
- GSoC contributor application deadline