Stanford's CS146S brings open-source maintainers in as reviewers, Latent Space reports

What happened

Latent Space published a 121-minute podcast episode on Nov 8 with Mihail Eric. He teaches The Modern Software Developer at Stanford and leads AI at Monaco. The episode was recorded to mark the AI Engineer YouTube channel passing a million subscribers, according to the show's description.

The main topic is the second run of Stanford's CS146S. Eric added open-source maintainers to the course. According to Latent Space, students must get up to speed on a codebase they have not seen before, draft a proposed change, and then talk the patch through with the person who could merge it.

The framing question is what to give students when a coding agent can finish last year's homework from a single prompt.

Key details

• The episode was posted Nov 8 and runs 121 minutes.
• Eric opens the CS146S syllabus on the show. It is ten weeks long.
• He says which lessons held up on his own engineering team, per the show notes.
• Monaco built its agent workspaces, bought its code review tools, and gave an on-call agent access to Datadog and GitHub.
• The hosts ask how Eric decides which tools his team should own. One timestamped section is titled "You buy to learn, and you build to keep."
• Other segments cover the loop, tools and harness inside a coding agent, context engineering for a large codebase, and making repos agent-ready.
• Later sections cover code review as a bottleneck, security and permissions, background agents, and Stripe's Minions.
• The show notes link a from-scratch coding agent build and a walkthrough of a real agent harness, both by Eric.

Why it matters

The episode describes two things that apply beyond a classroom. One is a test of engineering skill that a single prompt does not settle: reading unfamiliar code and defending a change to a reviewer. The other is how one team splits its tooling between building and buying.

This is a podcast description and show notes, not a published curriculum or study. The details above come from the listing on Latent Space. The full discussion is in the audio and video.

FAQ

What is Stanford CS146S? It is a Stanford course with a ten-week syllabus and assignments, taught by Mihail Eric. The Latent Space episode covers its second run.

What changed in the second run of the course? According to Latent Space, Eric brought open-source maintainers into the course to review student work.

What does Monaco's on-call agent have access to? Per the show description, Monaco gave an on-call agent access to Datadog and GitHub.