EECS 498-016 · Fall 2026 · University of Michigan
AASE · say it "A two S E"
One object, a coding agent, taken three ways across fifteen weeks. Use one to build one. Take the human out of its loop and measure what broke. Then grow it into an assistant worth keeping.
01 The premise
Software engineers increasingly direct systems that write code, instead of typing every line themselves. This course treats that work as an engineering discipline and teaches it like one: with theory, deliberate practice, instrumentation, and grading that rewards understanding over output.
You will spend the whole semester inside real tools. First you learn to drive a coding agent deliberately, and to diagnose failures using the Big Three: context, model, prompt. Then you drop below the abstraction and write your own agent against a raw LLM API, tool calls, loop and all. The back half of the course is where that agent grows a memory, a method, and a deployment, and becomes something you would actually keep.
Lectures run live demos. Labs are hands-on working sessions with checkoffs. Every project ships code that runs.
"The engineers we want to graduate can explain why an agent failed and fix the system around it."
02 Three phases
Use Aider to specify and build a pair-programmer. Sixteen guided lessons come first. Then you design the architecture, write specs and diagrams, and implement all seven features plus YAML configuration from documentation and development tooling. Both design and working behavior are graded, including your tests.
Take the human out of the loop and measure what broke. Call an LLM API directly, hand the model tools, and write the agent loop yourself. Then give it an approval layer, stop conditions, and an eval suite, so you can say what your agent does rather than guess.
Grow the agent into an assistant worth keeping. A wiki it can read, design skills it can run, hardening against the ways it fails, and a deployment. Coding agents all the way down: you use one to build one, then use that one to build the next.
Weights are locked. The three phases divide the 90% that is not administrative in the ratio 20 / 25 / 55, which is where 18 / 22.5 / 49.5 comes from. There are no exams. Full detail on the syllabus.
03 Outcomes
04 The stack
Everything runs on a normal laptop, and the course costs nothing beyond it. No textbook, no API bill, no subscription. You serve a small model yourself with Ollama. If your laptop cannot carry it, CAEN does, in the labs or from your own machine.
The course began Aug 31, 2026. Enrolled students: the syllabus and schedule are the source of truth for dates and policy, and Ed is where we reach you.
