Weekly two-hour lectures: one live demo, the week's core ideas, and Q&A to close. Slide decks are published here as the semester runs.
Every lecture runs to the same shape: one live agentic-coding demo, launched early and left running, three check-ins where you steer it, and Q&A to close. The lecture structure has the detail.
Lectures run Thursdays 11:00–13:00 in the Fulton Muir Building (95), Room 2.02, each teaching week of the semester. They’re captured by the standard ANU AV setup and the recordings land on Canvas — but a good deal of what makes a lecture worth attending doesn’t survive the capture, so see the record before you plan to watch rather than come.
Week 1: Introduction
Welcome to the Agentic Coding Studio
covers: The studio crit model, Agent loops, GitHub Pages deployment, Your participation, Assessment, Communication, Your LLM access, Onboarding, This course is an experiment, The lecture structure, The lecture-demos repo, Crit agents, Software and platforms, Forgotten web, Course overview
Week 2: Specs and self-portrait
The brief poses the problem, the spec is the contract, and your response is a self-portrait of the developer you want to be
covers: Spec-driven development, How browsers work, Claude Code cheatsheet, Task tracking, What's yours in the work, Assessment, The lecture-demos repo, Unsolicited redesign, Assignment 1
Week 3: Backpressure
Harness engineering is the art of giving good negative feedback — the model generates; the harness rejects what's wrong, fast and automatically
covers: Backpressure, Static site generators, Claude Code cheatsheet, Task tracking, GitHub Pages deployment, Assignment 1 retro, Assignment 1
Week 4: Context engineering
The agent's working memory as a designed resource — and, on the web side, the ceiling of static: neal.fun / pudding.cool-style interactive pages
covers: Context engineering, Skills, Claude Code cheatsheet, Task tracking, Your LLM access, Assignment 1 retro, An instrument, Assignment 1
Week 5: Verification
The agent says it's done — but has anyone run it, and do you still understand it? Verification, and the cognitive debt that green checks can't see
covers: Evaluating agent output, Backpressure, Skills, Assessment, What's yours in the work, A game, Assignment 2
Week 6: Evidence of practice
Read the transcript and the git log closely, reconstruct one consequential decision, and write what you learned into the harness, where the next session will read it
covers: Evidence of practice, GitHub Actions basics, Backpressure, The studio crit model, Onboarding, Assignment 2 retro, Assignment 2