The road to COMP4020: Agentic Coding Studio

20 Mar 26

comp4020

A small update: after much reflection since I originally submitted the course proposal (around September 2025, which is about 173 AI-years ago) I’ve decided to change the course name to “Agentic Coding Studio”. The course description remain unchanged, and the overall plan for the course (which is still coalescing—hence this blog series is still the same. But the more I’ve reflected on the course I’ve realised that what I (and the whole field of software development right now) is wrestling with is the best way to harness LLMs in productive Agentic Coding workflows, and the fact that the software domain is “the web” is important (and where we’ll do most of our work) many of the ideas I want my students to wrestle with are broader than that.

Also, I have a long history of trying to shoehorn the word “studio” into the projects/research groups/communities that I build… and so why stop now? The “studio” pedagogical model of making stuff in a community and watching others do the same is just such an apt description of the learning environment I hope to create in the course, too.

I will add that while naming things is hard and usually done retrospectively, Simon Willison (who has a knack for naming things) naming his online book Agentic Engineering Patterns tipped me over the edge into feeling like I just had to get “Agentic” into the title. It’s where the puck is heading, of that I’m sure.

@online{swift2026agenticCodingStudio,
  author = {Ben Swift},
  title = {The road to COMP4020: Agentic Coding Studio},
  url = {https://benswift.me/blog/2026/03/20/agentic-coding-studio/},
  year = {2026},
  month = {03},
  note = {AT-URI: at://did:plc:tevykrhi4kibtsipzci76d76/site.standard.document/2026-03-20-agentic-coding-studio},
}