Show HN: How to Build a Coding Agent (free workshop)

Summary

😎The following was developed last month and has already been delivered at two conferences. If you would like for me to run a workshop similar to this at your employer, please get in contact.GitHub - ghuntley/how-to-build-a-coding-agent: A workshop that teaches you how to build your own coding agent. Similar to Roo code, Cline, Amp, Cursor, Windsurf or OpenCode.A workshop that teaches you how to build your own coding agent. Similar to Roo code, Cline, Amp, Cursor, Windsurf or OpenCode. - ghuntley/how-to-build-a-coding-agentworkshop materials and source code for the workshop can we found hereHey everyone, I'm here today to teach you how to build a coding agent. By this stage of the conference, you may be tired of hearing the word "agent". You hear the word frequently. However, it appears that everyone is using this term loosely without a clear understanding of what it means or how these coding agents operate internally. It's time to pull back the hood and show that there is no moat.Learning how to build a coding agent is one of the best things you can do for your personal development in 2025, as it teaches you the fundamentals. Once you understand these fundamentals, you'll move from being a consumer of AI to a producer of AI who can automate things with AI.Let me open with the following facts:it's not that hardto build a coding agentit's 300 lines of coderunning in a loopWith LLM tokens, that's all it is. 300 lines of code running in a loop with LLM tokens. You just keep throwing tokens at the loop, and then you've got yourself an agent.Today, we're going to build one. We're going to do it live, and I'll explain the fundamentals of how it all works. As we are now in 2025, it has become the norm to work concurrently with AI assistance. So, what better way to demonstrate the point of this talk than to have an agent build me an agent whilst I deliver this talk? Cool. We're now building an agent. This is one of the things that's changing in our industry, because work can...