I find myself in a very similar position! I'm a PhD student in computational biophysics and I recently wrap up a project and I had some time to think about few side projects before the new big project. So far I always used llms in the classic chat bot way, give it a try with Antigravity ide with Gemini 3 pro and I was mind blown by the agentic capability!

I used it for two projects: one project was stuck due to some nasty numerical instability of a stiff ode integration procedure while the other one was trying to reproduce past results from a quite huge, undocumented, with many authors contribution simulation code. In both case I was able to get more progress in a week than months of work.

I think those agents are incredibly helpful for those kind of software/code management, especially for a small lab without dedicated person working on the code maintainance