Schedule

Printed copies of each paper are handed out at the end of the preceding class, and PDFs are linked below and can be found in the Box paper repository. This page is the authoritative version of the course schedule and is updated as the semester goes.

Date	Topic	Readings	Hands-On Activity
Mon Aug 24	Course Structure + What is a GenAI Development Tool?	None (welcome to class)
Mon Aug 31	GenAI Development Tool Use in the Software Industry	Butler et al., Dear Diary: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Generative AI Coding Tools in the Workplace, 2025. Dell’Acqua et al., Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality, 2023.	Activity 1
Mon Sep 14	Unanticipated Risks, Downstream Consequences, and Ethical Implications of Adoption	Choudhuri et al., Why Johnny Can’t Think: GenAI’s Impacts on Cognitive Engagement, 2026. Hasan and Biswas, What Breaks When LLMs Code? Characterizing Operational Safety Failures of Agentic Code Assistants, 2026.
Mon Sep 21	Anatomy of Agents Pt 1: Context, MCP, Skills	Yang et al., SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering, 2024. (pages 1-10 only) Rombaut, Inside the Scaffold: A Source-Code Taxonomy of Coding Agent Architectures, 2026. (pages 1-35 only)	Activity 2
Mon Sep 28	Anatomy of Agents Pt 2: Harness and Loop Engineering	Yang et al., Better Harnesses, Smaller Models: Building 90% Cheaper Agents via Automated Harness Adaptation, 2026. Madaan et al., Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback, 2023.
Mon Oct 05	Multi-Agent Systems and Autonomous Agentic Workflows	Cemri et al., Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?, 2026. Qian et al., ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development, 2024.	Activity 3
Mon Oct 19	Assessing Tooling and Judging Performance Claims Pt 1: Human-Centric Evaluations	Xia and Miller, Do These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends? Measuring the Post-Merge Fate of Agentic Code, 2026. Becker et al., Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity, 2025. (pages 1-12 only) Becker et al., We Are Changing Our Developer Productivity Experiment Design, 2026.
Mon Oct 26	Assessing Tooling and Judging Performance Claims Pt 2: Tool-Centric Evaluations	Position: Coding Benchmarks Are Misaligned with Agentic Software Engineering, 2026. Evtikhiev et al., Out of the BLEU: How Should We Assess Quality of the Code Generation Models?, 2023.	Activity 4
Mon Nov 02	Code Generation and Implementation	He et al., Speed at the Cost of Quality: How Cursor AI Increases Short-Term Velocity and Long-Term Complexity in Open-Source Projects, 2026. Liu et al., Debt Behind the AI Boom: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of AI-Generated Code in the Wild, 2026.
Mon Nov 09	Code Review and Quality Assurance	Adams et al., Automating Low-Risk Code Review at Meta: RADAR, Risk Calibration, and Review Efficiency, 2026. Alami and Ernst, Human and Machine: How Software Engineers Perceive and Engage with AI-Assisted Code Reviews Compared to Their Peers, 2025.
Mon Nov 16	Testing	Jain and Le Goues, TestForge: Feedback-Driven, Agentic Test Suite Generation, 2025. Alshahwan et al., Automated Unit Test Improvement Using Large Language Models at Meta, 2024.
Mon Nov 30	Program Repair and Refactoring	Xia and Zhang, Automated Program Repair via Conversation: Fixing 162 out of 337 Bugs for $0.42 Each Using ChatGPT, 2024. Yang et al., Revisiting Unnaturalness for Automated Program Repair in the Era of Large Language Models, 2025.
Mon Dec 07	Software Security and Software Supply Chains	Spracklen et al., We Have a Package for You! A Comprehensive Analysis of Package Hallucinations by Code Generating LLMs, 2025. Liu et al., Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scale, 2026. Ghanem, Builder, Defender, Breaker: The Case Against Removing the Human from the AI-Driven Security Lifecycle, 2026.
Wed Dec 09 (Designated Monday)	Unanticipated Risks, Downstream Consequences, and Ethical Implications of Adoption Pt 2 + Parting Message	Afroz et al., “AI Slop is DDoSing Open Source”: Understanding the Impact of AI-Generated Contributions on Open Source Sustainability, 2026. Motwani et al., Secret Collusion Among AI Agents: Multi-Agent Deception via Steganography, 2024.

Note: the final meeting is Wednesday December 9, a designated Monday.

Hands-on activity dates are announced in advance. Bring a laptop on those days.