The road to COMP4020: course software environment

24 Mar 26

comp4020

For the previous courses I’ve developed I’ve always (tried to, at least) think hard about the course software environment. This includes which OSes and software tools are installed on the lab machines, whether BYOD is allowed (and to what extent the tutors will support you in that case if your system is borked), in what environment the assessment will take place, etc.

Setting this out clearly is beneficial for me and for my students (and for our IT team, because they know what we’re on hook for supporting). And when I do allow BYOD (which I try to, unless there’s a good reason not to) I’m still able to say what the recommended software stack is and give some tips on how to install it. But I can also make it clear that if you do BYOD then we can’t guarantee that we can always unpick the knots you get yourself tied up in, and “the software stopped working the day before the deadline so I couldn’t complete the assignment” is never a way to get off the hook for late penalties.

Anyway, here’s my current thinking for “required setup” for the Agentic Coding Studio course:

• a working terminal environment where you can run e.g. Claude Code
• the ability to build & run Docker containers and other web infrastructure (e.g. node)
• Chrome/Chromium¹

While this means that students on macOS and Linux are probably going to have a better time than students on Windows, I don’t want to mandate this… just give a big’ol caveat emptor (maybe it’s “caveat artifex” for software developers?). It’s a course for undergraduate seniors and masters students, with solid pre-requisites, so I think this’ll be sufficient for this course. And because of the studio tutorial model I don’t want to have the tutorials in computer labs—I want them to be in flat, flexible rooms where we can re-configure the tables, chairs and screens as necessary to facilitate the best discussion dynamics.

#My software stack for teaching

However, for this course I will be clear with my students about the software stack that I’m using in my teaching, including in the lectures where I always do a lot of live coding². Basically it’ll be what I’ve previously written up as my new stack of choice for software development, which is unsurprising given that I designed that new stack around an agentic coding workflow. Although I won’t be forcing my students to use mutt :)

In particular, my plan for the lectures is to have a split screen:

• terminal (ghostty) on the left…
• running zellij as a multiplexer…
• which is managing multiple instances of Claude Code, Opencode etc. for coding, git for VCS, and helix for text editing, as well as other CLI/TUI tools as necessary
• Chrome on the right showing the current web page under development (i.e. the dev server, pointing to e.g. localhost:4321)

I don’t tend to talk from slides (and almost never use slide notes) so to the extent that the class will have slides they’ll also just be a website, probably reveal.js. This allows me to just mirror my whole display to the big screen. The students see everything I see, there’s nothing up my sleeve. I have no hard evidence for this, but I think this is pedagogically important; I really do want them to “look over my shoulder” as we work through things together. It does mean that I need to be careful I don’t (briefly) flash up my API keys or other sensitive info in plaintext, though.

A couple of cool things I’m considering (but haven’t tested yet) are:

• recording the terminal with asciinema (the direct video feed of the screen will already be recorded, but it might be cool to share the asciinema recordings to make it easy to copy/paste text for remixing, and even to have students do analysis on the logs from my agentic coding sessions in class)

• using Zellij’s new read-only session sharing so the students can see (in their own terminal) a live-streamed read-only view of what’s going on in my terminal. This might not add heaps—they can already see it on the projector screen, but again it’s a live view they can copy-paste from and remix on the fly. In fact, I’m excited about the idea that even during lectures I can have students mess with the provocations I throw out, do their own agentic coding experiments, and then we can have parts of the class where I go around the room and show off the different creations of the students from the lectures.

I’ve just submitted my timetabling request for the main lecture (where this setup will be used) and I’m hoping to get a newly-fitted out flat space with configurable seating and large-format displays on every wall. That way I can roam around with a madonna-mic and see what the students are doing and share these things back with the class. Because interactive lectures/lectorials are more fun, I reckon.

@online{swift2026courseSoftwareEnvironment,
  author = {Ben Swift},
  title = {The road to COMP4020: course software environment},
  url = {https://benswift.me/blog/2026/03/24/course-software-environment/},
  year = {2026},
  month = {03},
  note = {AT-URI: at://did:plc:tevykrhi4kibtsipzci76d76/site.standard.document/2026-03-24-course-software-environment},
}