5-Day Free Course · Deep Dive

How Agentic Coding IDEs Actually Work

The definitive text-first course on Claude Code, Cursor, and Google Antigravity. Terminal access, efficient search, parallel agents via git worktrees, stopping conditions, and building your own agent loop. With links to every open-source implementation and reference video worth your time.

5 days self-paced
Free forever
Text + external video refs
No signup required
agent $ rg "useAuth" 23 matches, 7 files $ git worktree add ../agent-1 feat/auth $ pytest -x PASS 42 tests $
5
Days
10+
Open-Source Refs
8+
External Videos
$0
Forever Free

No videos. On purpose.

This is a text-first course that links out to the best supporting material on the internet instead of trying to replace it. The goal is to make this the best course on agentic coding IDEs you can find — even without producing a single minute of custom video.

Practitioner-tested, not vendor marketing

This course is built by people who use Claude Code, Cursor, and custom agent loops every day to ship production AI systems. It reflects how these tools actually behave on real codebases — not how the landing pages describe them.

Code you can run, not demos you can watch

Every day has working code snippets you paste into a terminal and run right now. You will spin up a git worktree, run ripgrep against your own codebase, and build a toy agent loop before the week is over.

Links to the canonical sources

Instead of shooting videos we would have to re-shoot every six months, this course links to the definitive open-source implementations (Cline, aider, OpenHands, SWE-agent) and the best conference talks and deep-dive videos on the topic.

Completes in 5 one-hour sessions

Each day is designed to finish in about an hour of focused reading plus hands-on work. You can do the whole course over a week of lunch breaks. No calendar commitment, no live classes, no quizzes.

The 5 Days

Each day stands alone. Read them in order for the full picture, or jump straight to the day that answers the question you have today.

01Day One

How Agents Access the Terminal

The shell tool is the primitive everything else builds on. Learn how Claude Code, Cursor, and Antigravity spawn subprocesses, capture output, gate permissions, and stream results back into model context without blowing the budget.

subprocesspermissionsoutput streamingsandboxing
02Day Two

Efficient Code Search (rg, fd, ast-grep)

Why every agentic IDE replaced grep and find with ripgrep and fd. How to structure search output so agents don't burn 40,000 tokens on noise. When to reach for ast-grep for syntax-aware matching that regex can't do.

ripgrepfdast-grepcontext budget
03Day Three

Parallel Agents with Git Worktrees

The 15-year-old git feature that makes parallel agents possible. Learn to spin up N agents in N isolated working directories on the same repo. No merge conflicts, no lock files, no clever coordination protocol needed.

git worktreeisolationparallel execution
04Day Four

Iteration Loops and Stopping Conditions

Starting an agent is easy. Stopping one is the actual production problem. The four stopping strategies every serious agent combines: explicit done tool, success check, budget cap, and max iterations.

agent loopsstopping conditionsbudget capstest signals
05Day Five

Build Your Own Agent Loop

Capstone day. Fork Cline, strip it to the bare loop, wire in Claude Sonnet 4.6, and ship a minimal agentic coder you understand every line of. ~120 lines of Python. Works against any repo.

capstoneCline sourceClaude API~120 LOC

The best external videos on this topic.

Instead of shooting our own videos, we link to the best deep-dives already on YouTube. Watch them alongside the course. All external, all free, all from builders who ship this stuff.

Read the source. Every line.

The best way to understand any agentic IDE is to read one that is fully open. These four repositories implement every pattern in this course. Clone them, trace the code, modify the loop.

Three kinds of people read this.

Engineers Using Claude Code or Cursor Daily

You use them. You want to know what's happening under the hood so you can debug when they misbehave and use them more effectively.

Builders Making Their Own Agent Tools

You want to ship an agentic product. This course gives you the exact architecture to copy, with pointers to every open-source implementation that proves it works.

Technical Leaders Evaluating Agentic IDEs

You need to pick a tool for your team. This course explains the real differences (not the marketing differences) between the major options.

Want to Build With Agents in Person?

The 2-day in-person Precision AI Academy bootcamp covers real agent engineering — tools, loops, worktrees, deployment — hands-on with Bo. 5 U.S. cities. $1,490. 40 seats max. June–October 2026 (Thu–Fri).

Reserve Your Seat