RTFP · Working with coding agents

Read The F***ing Plan. First it was the manual, now it is the plan.

A two-hour Pi School workshop on working with coding agents: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Gemini CLI. The demos use Claude Code; everything else is built on open standards (AGENTS.md, Agent Skills, MCP, plugins), so it survives your next change of tool.

Nobody takes notes. Everything shown is here.

Start here

Before the session: START.md. Install mise, then one command installs every tool at a pinned version:

git clone https://github.com/PiSchool/rtfp-workshop && cd rtfp-workshop
mise trust && mise install
cd handson/cup && uv sync && just check

What's inside

Folder	What
whiteboard/	the canvas drawn during the session: rtfp.png to view, rtfp.excalidraw to open in excalidraw.com or VS Code
handson/	the Harness Cup: build the harness, let the agent work alone, see who passes the judge
templates/	AGENTS.md, deny list, hooks, a skill skeleton, commit template, success criteria, review checklist
resources/	standards, tools, providers and local models, MCP configs for five agents, reward hacking, references
marketplace.md	the Pi School plugin marketplace: what it is, how to add it, how to contribute

The map of the day

	Part	The idea
I	Vibes	vibe coding is not agentic engineering; the bottleneck is verification
II	Landscape	many tools, few ideas: interface, harness, model
III	Escape the lock-in	rent the model, own the workflow
IV	The engineering ladder	prompt → context → harness → graph → loop
V	The toolbox	AGENTS.md, rules, skills, subagents, hooks, MCP, plugins: what loads when, what enforces
VI	The plan	ask → plan → review → plan → execute; a failing test is a spec with a verdict
▶	Hands-on	the Harness Cup
VII	The team	GitHub as the control plane; shared, local, pruned; releases
VIII	Trust	the agent writes the code, the developer owns it
	Epilogue	RTFM → RTFP

Keep going

• Every source, by topic: resources/references.md.
• Tools worth knowing, by part of the workshop: resources/ecosystem.md. Start with GitDiagram: change github.com to gitdiagram.com in any repo URL.
• Homework: the MIT Missing Semester, Agentic Coding lecture. Do one small task four ways: by hand, autocomplete, chat, agent with a plan.