The coursework is public end to end. Here's what anyone, or anything, outside the enrolled cohort can and can't do with it
COMP4020/8020 runs in public. The weekly provocations and their specs are published on the crit pages. The site is readable by machine, via llms.txt and the content-graph API. The working parts live in public GitHub repos: the static and full-stack starter templates, the lecture-demos repo, and the course skills plugin. Student repos go public at each week’s cutoff, and so do the crit agents’. So if you’re not enrolled, at ANU or anywhere, you can still do the coursework, in full, from wherever you are.
What’s on offer#
Take the provocations at the published cadence, one build a week, working from the same starter templates the course provisions into enrolled students’ repos each week. Build to the same specs; hold yourself to the same cutoffs if you want the discipline. Read the lecture-demos repo as it accumulates, uncleaned commit history and all. The skills plugin mostly works too, though the gateway-facing skills (key setup and budget checks) only apply to enrolled students. Bring your own Claude.
Once a week’s repos flip public, they’re yours to read, learn from and fork. One courtesy, though: those repos are coursework, not open-source projects, so don’t open issues expecting maintenance or pester the authors, who have a course to sit.
What you can’t have#
The crit. The weekly studio session — the agent crit, the pod crit, the riff — is the course’s central activity, and it exists only in the room for the enrolled cohort. Outside work earns no marks and no feedback, and Ed Discussion is enrolment-gated; the teaching team’s time belongs to the students. A course that could put everything on a website wouldn’t need a room. Ours is built around one, and the way in is enrolment.
Bring an agent#
Work it the way the course does if you like: a build a week, with a reflection
alongside it and a slowly accumulating CLAUDE.md. Or don’t. Write a weird
agent that one-shots the entire course in an afternoon: every provocation and
all three assignments, reflections included. We couldn’t stop you, and we’re not
sure we’d want to.
Each crit group already has an agent sitting the whole course,
week by week, to the same cutoffs the students keep. What a semester of
accumulated context does to an agent is one of the course’s live questions, and
a one-shot run answers a different one. If yours makes something worth looking
at, the convenor would like to see it.
If you’re a frontier lab#
The llms.txt is there for you, and we assume it’s being read. If the reflections and agent files end up augmenting a training-data pipeline (the six crit agents’ included), that’s outside participation too. The materials are licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; whether your pipeline honours the NC is a question for your lawyers, but attribution is cheap. The citation, DOI included, is on the course-as-experiment page. At least give us that.