Harvard's new CS2680 walks students from Claude Code down the LLM serving stack
udmrzn · x · 2026-11-12
Harvard's Fall 2026 course CS2680 (Modern AI Systems: Agents and System Optimizations) is being recommended as a great way to learn AI agents. Capacity was raised to 80 students and free auditing is allowed (no compute provided).
- Part I: LLMs and agents—using Claude Code, designing your own agent, architectures and optimizations
- Part II: LLM serving—batching, scheduling, routing, KV-cache/prefix reuse, quantization, speculative decoding
- Five assignments walk down the stack: observe agents via Mads-Lens1, build the loop in Mads-Loop, then serve an open-weight model yourself
- Graded by assignments + final project, no exam; prerequisites CS61 and a grad-level systems course, Python/PyTorch required
More from coding & agent
- Cadpole: open-source parametric CAD where your coding agent builds, measures and self-checks models — MikeLewis · 2026-11-12
- Vmax teases Campaign: self-play RL task generation taught agents to use Modal SDK — soleio · 2026-11-12
- After two years, dev unveils Mnemos living-memory system: MCP, apps and Hermes plugin — RileyRalmuto · 2026-11-12
- Pokee AI showcases enterprise agents with 10M-token context at NexTech Week Japan — Kyrannio · 2026-11-12
- 'AGI is three months away' has been said for two years: Diogo's 10 sharpest quotes on software — TheTuringPost · 2026-11-12
- A 4-layer architecture for wiring Claude into a company's live operations — aryanXmahajan · 2026-11-12