AI Developer Essentials Curriculum

Build software with AI at the speed of understanding. Learn the principles, practices, and patterns that help developers collaborate, specify behavior, build quality in, and emerge designs—so your team can create software it understands, trusts, and can change.

THE WORK I LOVE, IN A NEW CHAPTER

I’ve spent much of my working life helping developers write code that’s easier to understand and change. I love the moment when an example reveals a missing rule, a test makes an expectation clear, or a pattern helps someone see a simpler solution. Those discoveries change how we work—and sometimes how we see our work.

AI has opened a new chapter in that exploration. I’m excited by what we can build together. I also know the feeling of looking at something AI has produced and realizing that generating it was easier than understanding it. That gap deserves our attention.

I don’t have every answer about where software development is going. I’m still learning, too. What I can share is a body of principles and practices I’ve used and taught for years, now adapted to the opportunities and challenges of collaborating with AI. They give us ways to make expectations explicit, examine our decisions, and learn as we build.

That’s why I’ve created AI Developer Essentials. It brings together the skills I believe developers most need when AI becomes part of the team: collaboration, behavioral specification, design judgment, code quality, testing, and the ability to evolve a solution without guessing its final shape at the start.

A DEVELOPMENT PROCESS YOU CAN UNDERSTAND AND EXPLAIN

Across the curriculum, we’ll return to a practical rhythm. Understand why a feature matters. Explore the domain and its behaviors. Work through examples, then embody the expectations in tests. Ask AI to implement a small increment. Examine the result, refactor where needed, and explain what you’ve learned before moving on.

We can repeat that rhythm as requirements change. We do enough to meet the behavior we’ve specified, while following practices that make the next change easier to accommodate. The design grows from evidence in the problem.

AI can participate throughout: exploring an idea, questioning a model, proposing tests, implementing behavior, and comparing designs. Developers remain active participants in the reasoning. We work together at the speed of understanding, with tests checking behavior and conversations making our decisions visible.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH THE COURSES

Agile Development with AI — Collaborate
We begin with Agile principles, development as discovery, and the mechanics of pairing and mobbing with people and AI. You’ll explore how shared models, small increments, and feedback help a team learn how to build together.
https://passprog.com/courses/agile-development-with-ai/

Agile Analysis with AI — Test First
We turn intent into concrete examples, strong contracts, and behavioral tests. You’ll explore outside-in and inside-out perspectives, Specification by Example, BDD, and test-first development with AI. The aim is to clarify what we expect before generating the implementation.
https://passprog.com/courses/agile-analysis-with-ai/

Developing Software with AI — Integrate and Build Quality In
We connect design principles, development practices, CREATE code qualities, and testing techniques. You’ll explore how to concentrate business rules in a testable domain model and connect it to the outside world through clear boundaries. Hand-crafted mocks, shunts, and dependency injection help us examine interactions without making every test depend on external systems.
https://passprog.com/courses/developing-software-with-ai/

Design Pattern Development with AI — Emerge Designs and Refactor
We deepen our understanding of patterns through the variations they encapsulate and the forces they resolve. You’ll use diagrams and a collaborative design exercise to discuss alternatives with people and AI, then explore how construction, behavior, sequence, and cardinality can evolve as requirements change.
https://passprog.com/courses/discovering-design-patterns-with-ai/

WHY TAKE THEM TOGETHER?

Each course stands on its own, but I believe they’re most effective together. The examples we clarify in analysis become expectations we can test. The domain model gives business rules a home. Code qualities help us examine the implementation. Patterns give us a vocabulary for discussing change, and refactoring lets us act on what we’ve learned.

The five practices—Collaborate, Test First, Integrate, CREATE, and Refactor—connect these ideas into a way of working. We learn both what good software looks like and how to get there incrementally with AI.

For developers, that means more ways to direct the work, evaluate suggestions, and explain the software taking shape. For managers and directors investing in their teams, it means a common foundation for technical decisions, earlier feedback on misunderstandings, and practices aimed at reducing avoidable rework and technical debt. Effective delivery grows from those capabilities.

LEARN TOGETHER, THEN DEEPEN THE EXPERIENCE

The curriculum includes twenty hours of live online instruction across four courses, typically delivered as five four-hour sessions. Design Pattern Development with AI spans the final two sessions. Examples, diagrams, discussion, brief AI-assisted exercises, and a collaborative design exercise bring the concepts into the room. Explorers receive substantive course slides to revisit afterwards.

You can pair the curriculum with any of our Collaboration Labs. The labs offer a complementary experience of collaborating with AI, followed by reflection on what happened and what we can learn from it. We can discuss which lab best fits your team’s goals.

We’re also developing a separate set of extended coding labs grounded in these lectures. Explorers will build an application together with AI, practicing behavioral specification, testable domain modeling, integration at the edges, and emergent design as requirements change. Those labs are in development and are not included in this bundle.

YOUR GUIDE

I’m David Scott Bernstein, author of Beyond Legacy Code and founder of The Passionate Programmer and To Be Agile. I’ve trained more than 10,000 professional developers in Extreme Programming, software design, test-first development, and writing changeable code.

I care deeply about this craft and the people who practice it. My hope is that you’ll leave with clearer ways to think, useful practices to try, and more confidence having the conversations that good software requires. I’d love to explore this next chapter with you.

LET’S TALK ABOUT YOUR TEAM

Tell me what your developers are building, how they’re working with AI, and where they’re getting stuck. We can explore whether the full curriculum, a particular course, or a combination with a Collaboration Lab would be useful for your team.

Schedule a conversation: https://passprog.com/schedule-a-call/