Landscape of Coding Agents

Tutorial slides for a 90-minute session at the NASA Responsible GenAI HACK Week (August 2026). This tutorial orients participants to the technology underneath AI coding tools, providing a shared mental model for the rest of the week.

Instructors

• Anthony Arendt
• Anshul Tambay
• Don Setiawan

Building the slides

cd slide_deck
./build.sh .
# Open build/index.html in a browser

For the second pass (with visuals added):

./build-visuals.sh .
# Open build/index-with-visuals.html

Publishing the slides

publish.sh produces a self-contained index-published.html with all images inlined as base64, so the file can be shared or hosted without any accompanying assets.

Prerequisites: run build-visuals.sh first so that build/index-with-visuals.html exists.

cd slide_deck
./build.sh .           # must run first
./build-visuals.sh .   # must run second
./publish.sh .
# Output: build/index-published.html

The script accepts an optional path argument (defaults to the current directory):

./publish.sh /path/to/slide_deck

Repository structure

• slide_deck/ — the presentation itself
  • SLIDES.md — primary design brief (content, structure, slide order)
  • VISUALS.md — second-pass visual additions
  • content/ — first-pass HTML slide fragments
  • assets/ — fonts and diagram images
  • shared/ — header/footer HTML
  • build/ — assembled output
  • mapping-exercise.md — Google Form spec for the interactive audience survey
  • topic-inventory.md — full HACK Week curriculum context

Acknowledgments

This tutorial was developed in collaboration with Anthropic's Claude models. All content was reviewed, edited, and approved by the human authors, and the pedagogical decisions and final phrasing are the authors' own.

Diagrams adapted from Jason Gilman (Element 84) are used with attribution on individual slides.