Best course for agent mechanics: Building Coding Agents with Tool Execution. DeepLearning.AI short course taught by Tereza Tizkova and Francesco Zuppichini. Start here to understand how coding agents inspect files, call tools, run commands, and iterate.
Best real-codebase workflow: Claude Code: A Highly Agentic Coding Assistant. DeepLearning.AI course taught by Elie Schoppik. Use it to learn planning, editing, testing, and review inside an existing repo.
Best official OpenAI reference: OpenAI Codex. Official OpenAI Codex documentation. Use it for current Codex behavior, review expectations, and coding-agent workflows.
Coding agents are software workflows
A coding agent is useful when it can inspect a repo, plan a scoped change, edit files, run commands, read failures, and leave a reviewable diff. The best resources teach that loop explicitly.
Start with Building Coding Agents with Tool Execution for mechanics, then use Claude Code and Codex material for real workflow behavior. Matt Pocock's agent-ready codebase material is useful once you want better results inside an existing repo.
Learn review habits alongside tools
Developers still own correctness. A good coding-agent resource should teach task scoping, context gathering, tests, diff review, preservation of unrelated changes, and when to stop the agent.
Avoid resources that only generate a new app from a blank prompt. Real codebases have conventions, failing setup, migrations, data constraints, and product judgement.
Recommended courses and resources
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Model Context Protocol Tutorial
Free tutorial · Matt Pocock · Intermediate
You want to understand MCP and build TypeScript MCP servers over stdio or HTTP, connect Claude Code to tools, use MCP prompts, and package servers for distribution.
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A Complete Guide To AGENTS.md
Guide · Matt Pocock · Intermediate
You want to write project instructions that help coding agents understand commands, conventions, architecture, and working boundaries.
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How To Make Codebases AI Agents Love
Guide · Matt Pocock · Intermediate
You want to improve a codebase so AI agents can navigate it, run checks, make smaller changes, and recover from mistakes more reliably.
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Real-world feature build with Claude Code: every step explained
Walkthrough · Matt Pocock · Intermediate
You want to see a real feature built with Claude Code from context gathering through implementation, verification, and iteration.
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My Skill Makes Claude Code GREAT At TDD
Guide / Claude skill · Matt Pocock · Intermediate
You want an agent workflow that implements behavior with a red, green, refactor loop instead of jumping straight to broad code changes.
