University of Michigan Opens Free Advanced Course on AI Agent Engineering

University of Michigan is offering a fully free upper-level course on building and operating AI coding agents this fall, with all lecture and lab materials published on GitHub. The 4-credit EECS 498 course, *Applied Agentic Software Engineering*, taught by Marcus Darden (voted HKN Professor of the Year in CSE, 2026), runs Tuesdays and Thursdays from August through December 2026 and is structured around three hands-on phases: applying existing agents to build software, analyzing agent behavior by removing human oversight, and creating bespoke agents from scratch.