Intro to Agentic Engineering

Free, in-person workshops at our Old Street campus. Work through a piece of our ML curriculum with our founders. No application required. Overview A taster for our ML engineer apprenticeship. Over one evening you will take a small Twitter clone from a one-line description to a public URL, with an agent doing the building. Along the way you will do every step of the engineering process properly. Background Most of what gets written about agentic coding is about prompting. This session is not. It is about specifications, tests, review and deployment, and how each of those changes when an agent is writing the code. The processes software engineering has built up over decades, specifications, acceptance criteria, tests, documentation and review, are more relevant now than they have ever been. They exist to carry understanding across a gap: from the person who knows what is wanted to the person or agent building it. The documents that used to feel like overhead become the way you tell the agent what to build, and the way you check what it built. They are also much quicker to produce than they were, because the agent can draft them too. Approaches to writing specifications vary. Spec-driven development, backed by tools such as AWS's Kiro and GitHub's Spec Kit, treats the specification as a contract kept in the repository alongside the code. Grilling, a method popularised by Matt Pocock, has the agent interrogate you about what you want until the answers themselves are the specification, which may be more suitable for one person building one thing in one sitting. That raises practical questions, and we will work through them on the night. How do you write a specification an agent can act on and you can check afterwards? What has to run automatically before you let a change through: tests, a security pass, a code quality pass, test data that looks like the real thing? And once you can no longer read every line, where should you still be looking? Who is this for Experienced software engineers who have used a coding agent, whether in the terminal, such as Claude Code or Codex, or in an editor such as Cursor or VS Code. What we will cover Discord Join our Discord server ahead of the workshop. We'll be sharing resources there on the day: https://discord.gg/8qPdKZ9Vjv What to bring A laptop. If you already use Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, bring it. Open-source coding harnesses such as OpenCode work too. If you don't have a subscription, we can give you access to a model API that you can plug into whichever harness you're most comfortable with. Hot-desking You're welcome to hot desk from 10am on the day. ​​​Access information: Please ring the Founders and Coders bell. The space is wheelchair accessible and has a lift. Our toilets are fully accessible. If you have any specific access needs, please let us know when you sign up and we'll do our best to help.