AI-native development · Glossary term
What is Coding Agent?
An agent specialized for software work that can inspect a repository, edit files, run development tools, and use their outputs to advance a scoped engineering task.
Why does Coding Agent matter?
Its value depends on repository context, tool permissions, review boundaries, and verification, not only code generation quality.
Coding Agent in practice
Give the agent an issue, a scope contract, repository instructions, and a test command; review the resulting patch and evidence before accepting it.
What is the common confusion about Coding Agent?
A coding assistant that only suggests text is not necessarily an agent. The agent acts through tools and observes results.
Learn Coding Agent in the course
Start with
- Skill Discovery and Progressive Disclosure
A skill becomes useful before its body is loaded. Its name and description earn a place in the catalog; its deeper files earn context only when the task reaches them.
Lessons that name Coding Agent in a title or section
- AlphaEvolve — Evolutionary Coding Agents
Pair a frontier coding model with an evolutionary loop and a machine-checkable evaluator. Let the loop run long enough. It discovers a 4x4 complex-matrix multiplication procedure that uses 48 scalar…
- The Autonomous Coding Agent Landscape (2026)
SWE-bench Verified went from 4% to 80.9% in under three years. Same Claude Sonnet 4.5 scored 43.2% on SWE-agent v1 and 59.8% on Cline autonomous — the scaffolding around the model now matters as…
- Capstone 01 — Terminal-Native Coding Agent
By 2026 the shape of a coding agent is settled. A TUI harness, a stateful plan, a sandboxed tool surface, a loop that plans, acts, observes, recovers.
- Capstone Lesson 29: End-to-End Coding Agent on the Harness
Track A's payoff. This lesson stitches the gate chain, the sandbox, the eval harness, and the OTel spans into one working coding agent that fixes a real (small, fixture-scale) bug in a multi-file…
Taught in Phase 13: Tools & Protocols.
Also covered in Phase 15: Autonomous Systems and Phase 19: Capstone Projects.
Related terms
- Agent HarnessThe runtime around a model that assembles context, exposes tools, manages state, enforces limits, records traces, and decides when the…
- Repository MapA compact, maintained description of a repository's important directories, ownership boundaries, entry points, build commands, tests,…
- PatchA reviewable representation of changes to one or more files, usually expressed as additions and deletions against a known base revision.
- Scope ContractA concrete agreement that defines a task's goal, allowed and forbidden surfaces, expected artifacts, verification requirements, and…
- Reviewer AgentAn agent assigned to inspect another agent's artifact or decision against explicit criteria and return findings or a verdict.
- Pass@kAcross a task set, the fraction of tasks for which at least one of k sampled candidates passes a defined correctness test.
- Repository InstructionsVersion-controlled guidance that tells coding agents how a repository is organized, which commands and conventions apply, what boundaries…
- SandboxAn isolated execution environment that restricts an agent's access to files, processes, network destinations, credentials, and host…
- WorktreeIn Git, a working directory attached to a repository and branch or commit, with shared object storage but its own checked-out files and…
More terms in AI-native development
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