Minor Agentic Software Development

Coordinators: Gilles MENEZ, maître de conférence and Johan MONTAGNAT, directeur de recherche, i3S laboratory (Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS)

FORMAT

Classroom

LOCATION

SophiaTech campus, Lucioles

PREREQUISITES

Coding experience with Python 

CAPACITY

30 students

ABOUT THIS MINOR

Summary

LEARNING OUTCOMES

In this course, students will: 

  • Learn general principles of LLM and their different types; 
  • Distinguish between LLM, RAG, agent and agentic workflow; 
  • Deploy models on local resources to perform experimentations; 
  • Explore a professional agentic software development tool; 
  • Discover agentic AI capabilities in software development while acknowledging its limitations and proper use of such tools. 
This course aims to provide an understanding of the principles and development of generative agent-based AI, with a strong emphasis on its practical use. It is illustrated through its application in the field of software development. It covers the history of AI development up to modern agent-based AI systems. It illustrates the principles of operation, the different types of models, and key settings through the installation and experimentation with various LLMs running on local resources, as well as complementary external tools. It draws on Anthropic’s Claude Code solution, which has been widely adopted by the professional community, to teach participants how to master AI-assisted software development. It covers the implementation of a RAG, the deployment of agents through an MCP interface, and multi-agent systems. It raises awareness of the risks associated with using AI models, their costs, their limitations, and the factors that can improve software development productivity. 
Lecturers
  • Mohamed KADRI, Monitoring and Observability Solution Architect at Sopra Steria – Field of expertise: Elastic Stack Architect, Software Engineering, Agentic AI 
  • Nikan Zandian JAZI, PhD student at CNRS, i3S laboratory – Field of expertise: spiking neural networks (SNNs), formal verification, large language models 
Bibliography

Scientific books:

  • Alammar, J. & Grootendorst, M., Hands-On Large Language Models: Language Understanding and Generation, O'Reilly Media, 2024. ISBN 9781098150969
  • Huyen, C., AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models, O'Reilly Media, 2025. ISBN 9781098166304
  • Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch), Sebastian Raschka, Manning

Foundational articles available for self-service:

  • Vaswani, A. et al., Attention Is All You Need, NeurIPS, 2017. arXiv:1706.03762
  • Lewis, P. et al., Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks, NeurIPS, 2020. arXiv:2005.11401
  • Liu, N. F. et al., Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts, 2023. arXiv:2307.03172
  • Becker, J., Rush, N., Barnes, E. & Rein, D., Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity, METR, 2025. arXiv:2507.09089

Self-service technical resources:

Security frameworks:

  • OWASP GenAI Security Project, OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications — genai.owasp.org
  • OWASP GenAI Security Project, OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications — genai.owasp.org

Université Côte d'Azur's Library Resources

Evaluation
Type of evaluation Date or Submission deadline Time Location
(for on-site exams)		 % of the final grade
Deliverable Submission deadline: 19/11/2026 N/A SophiaTech campus, Lucioles 1/3
Oral project presentation Date of the exam: 03/12/2026 15 minutes / presentation SophiaTech campus, Lucioles 2/3
Presence

Presence is mandatory. A 1-point penalty will be applied to the final grade for each unjustified absence, up to a maximum of 3 points deducted from the final grade for the course unit. 

 

SCHEDULE FALL 2026

 
Mind the evaluation modalities and deadlines in the "Evaluation" tab above.
Date Time Slot Course title Lecturer Location
08/10/2026 9h00-12h00 Understanding generative AI Mohamed Kadri SophiaTech campus, Lucioles
15/10/2026 8h30-13h00 LLM principles and local models Nikan Zandian Jazi SophiaTech campus, Lucioles
22/10/2026 8h30-13h00 RAG Nikan Zandian Jazi SophiaTech campus, Lucioles
05/11/2026 9h00-12h00 Introduction to agentic AI Mohamed Kadri SophiaTech campus, Lucioles
12/11/2026 9h00-12h00 Agents, tools and MCP Mohamed Kadri SophiaTech campus, Lucioles
19/11/2026 8h30-12h30 Agentic coding Mohamed Kadri SophiaTech campus, Lucioles
26/11/2026 8h30-12h30 Agentic coding Mohamed Kadri SophiaTech campus, Lucioles
03/12/2026 8h30-12h30 Projects presentation Mohamed Kadri SophiaTech campus, Lucioles