Tuesday
Thursday
Wk 1
Tue 08/25
What stays human, and where the agent works
Code is abundant; judgment and verification are scarce
Log the course host into your GitHub identity
Thu 08/27
How a coding agent acts, and the environment it acts in
Agree on the approach and the evidence first
Split setup scripts by what they change
Wk 2
Tue 09/01
Cheaper sessions, checked by another model
HW DUE dotfiles
Spend the session's working memory deliberately
Thu 09/03
Durable data, and what your v1 teaches you
SQLite for local data that must stay durable
Wk 3
Tue 09/08
Contain what an unwatched agent can reach
The attacker never logs in; you deliver their text
Thu 09/10
What survives a crash, and what survives a session
Design every write around the crash that interrupts it
Wk 4
Tue 09/15
Where a write commits, and where parallel work merges
Log the old page or the new one; both commit atomically
Parallelize a task once you can name its merge point
Thu 09/17
Turing machines on a fixed compute budget
Spend a fixed budget where it changes the ranking
Wk 5
Tue 09/22
Hidden assumptions, and lessons from email-index
An early guess can commit callers to a whole design
Lessons from the email-index homework
Lessons from your email-indexin class only
Thu 09/24
How git records a change, and how a PR argues for it
Immutable snapshots and movable refs explain git
Wk 6
Tue 09/29
The tm-compute quiz, and a guest lecture by Brent Waters
Guest lecture by Brent Waters
Thu 10/01
Guest lecture by Brent Waters
Guest lecture by Brent Waters
Wk 7
Tue 10/06
What correct means when threads interleave
Correctness depends on every legal thread interleaving
One sequential order that respects real time
Thu 10/08
Why concurrent code slows down
Scaling, progress, and storage fail separately
Measuring performance moved to Oct 13
Wk 8
Tue 10/13
Inside a concurrent index, and measuring a speedup
HW DUE tm-compute PR round
Lock one leaf at a time; publish a split as a snapshot
Thu 10/15
Testing under overlap, tm-compute lessons, your feedback
A concurrency test forces overlap and checks any order
Lessons from the tm-compute homework
Lessons from your tm-computein class only
Mid-semester feedbackin class only
Wk 9
Tue 10/20
Recover a PDF's lost structure, and what review changed
HW DUE concurrent-index quiz
A PDF stores marks, so structure is an inference
Lessons from the tm-compute PR round
Lessons from your PR roundin progressin class only
Thu 10/22
Protecting a secret, and using it safely with agents
Encryption hides a secret; integrity catches tampering
Few plaintext copies, each consumer only its secrets
Wk 10
Tue 10/27
Virtualizing an interface, and who supplies the kernel
Every rung virtualizes an interface, from $PATH to a VM
A container borrows the host kernel; a VM brings its own
Thu 10/29
Parallel hardware, and the parallel index you built
A GPU is fast only on regular, independent work
Lessons from the concurrent-index homework
Lessons from your concurrent-indexin progressin class only
Wk 11
Tue 11/03
Making matrix multiply fast on a GPU
Fast matrix multiply reuses every value it loads
Once the math is fast, speed is data movement
Thu 11/05
What a language model computes, and what the cloud runs
HW DUE pdf2md quiz
Text is sampled from next-token probabilities
You ship an image, and every boundary has an owner
Wk 12
Tue 11/10
How a transformer runs, and how it learns
Mix across positions, then within one; cache the past
Training nudges every weight toward the next token
Thu 11/12
The data that shapes a model, and lessons from pdf2md
Same loss, different data: predictor, then assistant
Lessons from the pdf2md homework
Lessons from your pdf2mdin progressin class only
Wk 13
Tue 11/17
Retries that converge, and tests that judge a model
A stable identity makes retries converge on one effect
A test suite rewards and grades until its answers leak
Thu 11/19
Topics to come
Topic A to be determined
Topic B to be determined
Wk 14
Tue 11/24
Thanksgiving break
🦃 Thanksgiving break
Thu 11/26
Thanksgiving break
🦃 Thanksgiving break
Wk 15
Tue 12/01
Demonstrate the system and defend the evidence
Thu 12/03
What the projects taught us about working with agents
Final project demos continued 🎤
Final project demos: Fri Dec 4 marathon 🎤
Slide decks organized by topic
Platform
Accounts
Tools
Working with agents
I use tmux, claude, and codex to make a small python game. I refine the design a few times and do the game and UI in parallel.
Homework
Final project
Final project guidein progress