The road to COMP4020: token management by proxyDesigning a proxy to sit between students and the Claude API: per-student quotas, full-traffic logging, and a safety net for leaked keys.Ben Swift·Apr 22·8 min readFollowcomp4020
The road to COMP4020: pledges, not questionsReplacing two of the three weekly reflection questions with falsifiable pledges, and using a cross-eval matrix to find the interesting disagreements.Ben Swift·Apr 16·9 min readFollowcomp4020
COMP4020: assessmentWhat does a student hand in for an agentic coding course---and how do I make that artefact worth more than the grade itself?Ben Swift·Apr 15·6 min readFollowcomp4020teaching
The road to COMP4020: Agentic Coding for Conscientious ObjectorsWhat would I say to a student who's staunchly anti-AI but curious about COMP4020?Ben Swift·Apr 8·2 min readFollowcomp4020
The road to COMP4020: the professorial classAcademics are welcome to audit COMP4020---here's how I'm planning to make it work.Ben Swift·Apr 7·2 min readFollowcomp4020
The road to COMP4020: Anthropic comes to the partyCOMP4020 has received $500k in Claude API credits from Anthropic for students to use in the Agentic Coding Studio course.Ben Swift·Apr 2·2 min readFollowcomp4020
COMP4020: the story so farA catch-up post for the COMP4020 Agentic Coding Studio blog series---what the course is, how it works, and what's still unresolved.Ben Swift·Mar 31·5 min readFollowcomp4020teaching
The road to COMP4020: what's the theory here?There are lots of nascent theories for agentic coding---here's a survey, and a plan to test them with 200 students.Ben Swift·Mar 30·6 min readFollowcomp4020
The road to COMP4020: agents in the classroom?What if an AI agent enrolled in the course alongside the students---building prototypes, writing reflections, observing patterns?Ben Swift·Mar 30·9 min readFollowcomp4020
The road to COMP4020: managing the strategic token reserveHow to provision and manage AI token budgets for a class of agentic coding students.Ben Swift·Mar 27·4 min readFollowcomp4020
The road to COMP4020: the weekly questionsThree evergreen questions and 280-character skeets to scaffold reflective practice in each weekly studio crit.Ben Swift·Mar 26·6 min readFollowcomp4020
The road to COMP4020: course software environmentEvery CS/software development course has a policy on what software it uses - the only different is whether it's written down or not.Ben Swift·Mar 24·5 min readFollowcomp4020
The road to COMP4020: Agentic Coding StudioRenaming the course to Agentic Coding Studio---because what we're really teaching is the craft of harnessing LLMs in coding workflows.Ben Swift·Mar 20·2 min readFollowcomp4020
The road to COMP4020: Radical opennessMaking all weekly prototypes visible to every student---source code, deployed apps, the lot. Radical openness as a teaching strategy for COMP4020.Ben Swift·Mar 18·3 min readFollowcomp4020
The road to COMP4020: safety, YOLO and the open webFly Sprites as lightweight, snapshotable VMs for student coding---safe enough for YOLO mode, live on the open web by default.Ben Swift·Mar 5·4 min readFollowcomp4020
The road to COMP4020: climbing the "good" gradientProducing code is easy; knowing whether it's good is still hard. Three nested feedback loops for ascending the quality gradient in agentic coding.Ben Swift·Feb 24·5 min readFollowcomp4020teaching
The road to COMP4020: the core mechanicThe repeating loop at the heart of COMP4020: provocation, prototype, studio crit. An art-school model adapted for agentic software development.Ben Swift·Feb 20·7 min readFollowcomp4020teaching
The road to COMP4020: providing sharp toolsGetting 200 students adequate access to frontier coding agents is the hard logistics problem behind COMP4020.Ben Swift·Feb 17·4 min readFollowcomp4020
COMP4020/8020: Rapid Prototyping for the WebDesigning a new ANU course on building web apps with coding agents---studio-based, prototype-driven, moving beyond naive vibecoding.Ben Swift·Dec 19·3 min readFollowteachingcomp4020
