CMSC398Z

PREREQUISITE: Minimum grade of C- in CMSC320 or CMSC330; and permission of CMNS-Computer Science department. Covers how to effectively use AI coding assistants and agents to develop software. The course will look at the tools and techniques used by engineers at companies like Google and Microsoft to develop production-quality code, as well as techniques to vibe code and quickly generate interactive visualizations and proof-of-concepts. The course will cover using chatbots, AI-powered IDEs such as VSCode and cursor.ai,and coding assistants that can automatically invoke build systems, run test cases, and fix errors. The course will also cover Python and Simon Willison s LLM tool, which allows writing simple Pythonprograms that query LLMs and interact with databases, structured data extraction, and semantic search.