Calendar
CSIC30216 · Fall 2026
All classes meet on Mondays. Slides and lab guides are linked as they are released.
| Wk | Date | Topic | Lab | Self-paced | Due |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sep 7 | Introduction to AI-Assisted SE | AI Telephone — experiencing the intent-output gap | History of language models | |
| 2 | Sep 14 | How LLMs Actually Work | API exploration — tokens, system prompts, context | In-context learning and instruction tuning | |
| 3 | Sep 21 | Working with AI in a Team | Repository setup + team norms + evaluation plan (2%) | How engineering teams adopt AI tooling | Team Formation (by 9/25) | Course Initiation Survey |
| 4 | Sep 28 | National Holiday — Teacher's Day Holiday | Optional enrichment reading | ||
| 5 | Oct 5 | Prompt Engineering — Writing Prompts Well | Writing prompts well — code generation focus | Chain-of-thought variations | Assignment 1 (10%) |
| 6 | Oct 12 | Understanding Why Prompts Fail Async | Hallucination red-team notebook (async) | RLHF, Constitutional AI, and calibration | CP1 (5%) |
| 7 | Oct 19 | Tool use, function calling, and MCP Online | Self-correcting pipeline (online) | APE and self-consistency | |
| 8 | Oct 26 | National Holiday — Retrocession Day Holiday | Optional enrichment reading | ||
| 9 | Nov 2 | Context Management and Grounding (RAG) | Two-tool agent + prompt system sketch | Evolution of tool use | T1 Survey |
| 10 | Nov 9 | Prompt testing and reliability | Build a minimal RAG pipeline | Vector databases and RAG evaluation in depth | T1 Survey |
| 11 | Nov 16 | AI-assisted code generation and debugging | Prompt test suite with PromptFoo | How researchers evaluate LLM outputs at scale | Assignment 2 (12%) |
| 12 | Nov 23 | Evaluating and Debugging AI-Assisted Code | Claude Code debugging split lab | Code evaluation benchmarks and AI pair programming patterns | CP2 (15%) |
| 13 | Nov 30 | When Is an Agent the Right Tool? | PR review workshop + evaluation methodology revisit | Engineering team culture around AI | T2 Survey |
| 14 | Dec 7 | Ethics, Safety, and Professional Responsibility | Minimum viable agent | Agents in production | T2 Survey |
| 15 | Dec 14 | Guest Lecture (TBA) | Case study discussion | Super-alignment research and open problems | Assignment 3 (10%) | CP3 (12%) |
| 16 | Dec 21 | Final Presentations | Lightning talks + poster/demo session | Assigned by guest speaker | Video | Peer eval |