Agentic Coding
in Practice
By Matthew Sinclair
A hands-on, five-day course on building real software with AI coding agents -- from the shifting landscape and the human-agent conversation, through architecture and process, to the hard reckoning of shipping agent-built code. Built from 18 months of real development: 12+ repositories, 3,456 commits, 155 sessions, and one honest failure.
Start reading free: the syllabus
The five days
Five consecutive days, each a theory session plus hands-on practice. The arc runs from orientation to synthesis:
- Day 1: The Landscape -- Where are we? The agentic ecosystem, the autocomplete-to-autonomous spectrum, and the gap between what the tools do and what we do with them.
- Day 2: The Conversation -- How do we communicate with agents? Context engineering over prompt engineering, and the delegation model.
- Day 3: The Architecture -- How do we structure code for agents? CLAUDE.md as living architecture, the Highlander Rule, and skills as procedural memory.
- Day 4: The Process -- How do we plan and execute work? Steel threads, the session lifecycle, and knowing when to stop.
- Day 5: The Reckoning -- What goes wrong? The MeetZaya failure case study, regression cascades, the generation trap, and honest productivity data.
Each day's hub links its theory, exercises, reference card, and that day's Insights. See it all at a glance on the course map.
What you'll get
Attendee Pack
The course companion: the full five-day programme -- theory, exercises, and a reference card per day -- ready to follow along.
Complete Reference
Everything in the Attendee Pack plus the 26-Insight reference, the Enterprise guide, and a downloadable pack for every day.
Insights Reference
The 26 Agentic Coding Insights (ACIs): the field-tested rules, a la carte.