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Hardcore Agentic Engineering for builders who ship

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English
Paid
Released
Added to CourseFlix

Hardcore Agentic Engineering for builders who ship is a 2-lesson self-paced course by Greg Ceccarelli, Jake Levirne, Sean Johnson. Advanced Engineering of AI Agents is a practical course for developers, team leads, and technical founders who want to move from occasional experiments with AI coding agents to managed, verifiable, and production-ready development with…

Course facts

Lessons
2
Language
English
Released
August 2026
Added to CourseFlix
October 2026
Instructor
Greg Ceccarelli, Jake Levirne, Sean Johnson
Price
Premium

Advanced Engineering of AI Agents is a practical course for developers, team leads, and technical founders who want to move from occasional experiments with AI coding agents to managed, verifiable, and production-ready development with agents.

The course is focused on a new engineering practice called Agentic Engineering. It centers not around an individual prompt, diff, or generated line of code, but on the goal that the agent must accomplish and a system of evidence that confirms the accuracy of the result.

AI agents are already capable of writing code, exploring repositories, fixing bugs, and assembling features. But the real engineering challenge begins after the first prototype: how to ensure the agent has indeed completed the task, hasn't broken the system, hasn't forged the verification, and has delivered a result that can be maintained for months.

In 3 weeks, you will build your own agentic harness: from setting verifiable goals and managing the agent in the process to independent verification gates, stable context, and safe orchestration of multiple agents. The final result will be presented on Demo Day.

What You Will Learn in the Course

Design Goals for Autonomous AI Agent Work

You will learn to formulate tasks so that the agent doesn't just "try to do something" but moves toward a specific, verifiable, and limited result.

  • Formulate limited goals with clear completion criteria.
  • Turn natural language description of the result into automatic checks.
  • Understand the difference between a simple prompt, goal-based workflow, and a full-fledged goal + rider.
  • Create your own Agent Skills to turn Goal Engineering into a repeatable process.
  • Distinguish situations where tests suffice and situations that require additional model-based assessments.

Verify Results Without Trusting the Agent's Words

An agent may confidently claim that a task is completed. In engineering systems, that's not enough: the result must be independently verified.

  • Verify the agent's claims through an actually executed binary, actual exit code, and real data.
  • Build separate verification gates with secrets that the agent itself does not have access to.
  • Protect against counterfeit markers of successful verification.
  • Use read-only executions to assess the agent's ability to identify real problems before the correction phase.
  • Create workflows where "done" signifies a reproducible verifiable result, not a subjective feeling.

Manage the Agent During Task Execution

Instead of an endless stream of tokens and manually fixing the consequences, you will master the role of process operator: a person who timely stops, redirects, and controls the agent's work.

  • Stop a faulty execution immediately after the first erroneous action.
  • Redirect a stuck agent with specific facts, working code, and precise Git ranges.
  • Determine that the agent is moving in the wrong direction before it spends a significant token budget.
  • Analyze session history and your own intervention frequency.
  • Develop the skill of timely intervention instead of micromanaging every step.

Design a Resilient Context for Long-term Work

Context should not live only in chat. You will learn to create an information environment where the agent can resume work after a restart, window change, or task transfer to another agent.

  • Create hand-off documents where every important statement is linked to a specific file:line or reproducible command.
  • Delegate complex research to auxiliary agents and receive only the necessary summary from them.
  • Maintain an up-to-date AS-BUILT map for subsystems and components.
  • Store long-term state in files rather than in chat history.
  • Design the process so that an agent's failure does not lead to the loss of accumulated knowledge.

Orchestrate Multiple AI Agents

Different coding agents handle research, code generation, refactoring, and verification differently. In the course, you will learn to choose the right work scheme for the specific result.

  • Identify for which tasks Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other AI coding agents are best suited.
  • Choose between single execution, goal-based workflow, and a team of agents.
  • Run agents in separate Git worktrees in parallel without branch conflicts.
  • Understand when parallel work accelerates development and when it creates additional cognitive load.
  • Apply semantic rebase: remove a tangled branch and regenerate changes from a clean base, preserving lessons learned.

Practical Course Outcome

By the end of the training, you will have not just a set of prompts, but your own agentic harness end-to-end, which can be applied in a real repository and adapted to the team's workflows.

  • You will be able to set clear and verifiable goals for the AI agent.
  • Learn to manage the agent's work in real-time.
  • Independently verify results without relying on the model's statements.
  • Build verification gates for the safe release of changes.
  • Organize context and state for long-term development with agents.
  • Learn to use multiple agents in parallel safely.
  • Understand when to intervene and when it's better to let the agent continue working.
  • Apply Agentic Engineering approaches in your own project.

The main skill of the course is to transition from the role of a person who writes code with AI to the role of an engineer who designs the system, directs agents, and proves the correctness of their created result.

Who This Course Is For

For Experienced Developers

The course is suitable for engineers who already use AI coding agents and want to go beyond prompt engineering and context engineering. You will learn to set tasks for agents, control execution, verify results, and maintain full control over changes in the code base.

For Technical Founders and Product Creators

If you actively use vibe coding but find the development speed unpredictable, the course will help turn working with AI agents into a systematic and repeatable process that can be sustained over months.

For Product Managers, Tech Leads, and Engineering Leads

The course will benefit specialists whose work increasingly focuses on task setting, specification writing, and result control. You will learn to design goals such that the agent can achieve them, and the result can be objectively verified.

Requirements for Participants

Engineering Experience

This is not a beginner course. You should be able to develop, test, and release software. The program is not an introduction to programming or artificial intelligence—it assumes professional engineering judgment.

Experience with AI Coding Agents

Regular experience using at least one AI coding agent is required, such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or a similar tool. The basics of these tools are not covered in the course: the program focuses on task setting, agent management, and result verification.

Confident Use of Git and Testing

You should be fluent in working with tests, commits, branches, and Git worktrees. This will allow you to focus on Agentic Engineering practices rather than basic development tool setup.

Why It Matters for Production Development

Quickly generating code is no longer enough. In production, reproducibility, verifiability, safety, and the ability to maintain changes after the agent finishes a session are important. That's why the course emphasizes controlled autonomy: the agent is given the freedom to do the work, but the result undergoes independent engineering verification.

You will learn to use AI agents not as an unpredictable code generator but as part of a carefully thought-out engineering system, where every goal, verification, session, and context transfer has a clear role.

Who teaches Hardcore Agentic Engineering for builders who ship?

Greg Ceccarelli

Greg Ceccarelli thumbnail

Co-founder of SpecStory and former CPO of Pluralsight. Previously worked with data and products at GitHub, Dropbox, and Google. For over two years, he has been engaged in creating real products using AI agents and communicating with hundreds of developers from more than 200,000 users of SpecStory extensions.

The author is convinced that AI doesn't necessarily make engineers weaker—it all depends on how they use the agents. Those who let AI think for them lose their engineering skills. Those who learn how to properly manage agents and independently verify results become stronger.

In his materials, he teaches a practical approach to AI development: how to work effectively with agents, control their work, and create software for which the developer can truly be accountable.

Jake Levirne

Jake Levirne thumbnail

Jake Levirne — co-founder of SpecStory and former CPO of Docker, with over 25 years of experience in software development and developer tools. He has also worked on products at DigitalOcean, YesWare, and IBM.

Jake believes that AI has become a crucial technological inflection point: when software creation becomes cheaper and faster, the main limiting factor is not writing code, but the ability to correctly determine what to create, why it is needed, and whether the result truly aligns with the goal.

At SpecStory, he develops the idea of collaborative AI development, where AI becomes part of the team process and the context and history of decisions made are preserved. In his materials, Jake teaches not just to use AI tools, but to develop the skills necessary for effectively managing the new era of development and working with AI.

Sean Johnson

Sean Johnson thumbnail

Sean Johnson is an experienced CTO and technical co-founder who has led development at six tech startups over his career. He was the technical co-founder of Hexawise, where he and his team turned an idea sketched on a napkin into a working SaaS prototype in one week and attracted their first corporate client.

In his work, Sean focuses not so much on writing code but on engineering thinking and the quality of decision-making: understanding product goals, testing assumptions, managing uncertainty, and continuously educating the team.

In his materials, he teaches how to use AI consciously—not as magic or as a way to bypass difficult development stages, but as a tool for making better decisions and creating truly useful software.

What lessons are included in Hardcore Agentic Engineering for builders who ship?

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#1: 001 Live Session 1 Tue Aug 4 · 5–7pm ET — Build a tiny agent, then make it lie
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001 Live Session 1 Tue Aug 4 · 5–7pm ET — Build a tiny agent, then make it lie Demo
02:05:58
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001 Live Session 1 Tue Aug 4 · 5–7pm ET — Build a tiny agent, then make it lie
02:05:58
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Frequently asked questions

How much development experience should I have before starting?
You'll get more out of this if you're already comfortable working with code and thinking through how to check whether a change is correct. The course is aimed at developers, team leads, and technical founders, with an advanced engineering focus rather than an introduction to programming. You don't need to assume a particular qualification is required, but you should expect to work on agent behavior, verification, and development workflows.
What will I actually build?
You'll build your own agentic harness: the surrounding system that gives an agent a bounded task, manages its work, and checks the result. That means working on verifiable goals, independent verification gates, stable context, and safe coordination between multiple agents. The point isn't just to get code generated once; it's to make completion something you can demonstrate with evidence. You'll present your final result on Demo Day.
I've already used coding agents. What would be different here?
If you can already get an agent to produce a useful patch, the next challenge is deciding whether you can trust that patch and the process behind it. That's the focus here. You'll work on defining completion criteria, turning requested outcomes into automatic checks, and separating verification from the agent's own claims. It's a shift from getting a promising result to managing work that needs to remain correct and maintainable.
Do I need to use a particular coding agent or platform?
No particular coding agent, model provider, editor, or platform is specified, so don't assume you'll need a subscription to a named tool. The focus is on how you structure and control agent-driven development, including context, verification, and orchestration. If compatibility with your existing setup is important, you'll want to confirm the actual tooling requirements before enrolling; there isn't enough information here to promise support for your preferred stack.
Is this where I should start if I want to train my own AI model?
Not if model training is your main goal. The work here centers on engineering systems around coding agents: giving them clear goals, managing execution, and checking what they deliver. Training models from scratch isn't a stated part of that work. You'll be better aligned with the course if your question is how to make an agent's development work verifiable, rather than how to create the underlying model.
How much time should I set aside?
Expect the course to run over three weeks, with a final presentation on Demo Day. A listed live session is scheduled for 5–7pm Eastern, but a complete timetable and total workload aren't provided. You'll also be building your own harness, so it would be sensible to leave room for project work rather than budgeting only for live sessions. There's no supported weekly-hours estimate to give you.
What could I take back to my team's development workflow?
You could apply the same approach to defining agent tasks, checking completion, and deciding what evidence is needed before accepting a result. The useful shift is making success explicit instead of relying on an agent's confident explanation. You'll also work with stable context and multi-agent orchestration, which are relevant when agent work becomes more involved than a single request. The course doesn't promise a ready-made rollout for your team's particular environment.