We have several tools that we will be using over the course of this workshop. Let's flag these to you early so you can download and set these things up early.
Replit
Replit is a phenomenal AI agent coding tool. This is what we'll use for the first half of the course for you to take your ideas to working apps. You'll need an account here and we'll give you some free credits to get started with. This is a website you will use, and not a program you will download. Replit does have some free usage, but generally you'll need to pay to get the most out of Replit.
GitHub
GitHub is where every developer stores their code. It makes it easy to track the evolution of your code over time, and for you to collaborate on the same codebase with other. You'll need this not only to learn how to interact with GitHub itself, but we will be using GitHub Copilot as a coding agent as well, and that will use this same account. GitHub is free to use, and Copilot has a generous free tier.
Visual Studio Code
We will be using Microsoft's Visual Studio Code code editor. This is a program you will download and use it to edit code directly, as well as use Microsoft's coding agent, GitHub Copilot, to use AI to edit code. This is one of many options you could choose to edit the code, but obviously being biased here because I work at Microsoft and I used to work on Visual Studio Code myself. We'll talk about alternatives you could use further into the course. VS Code is free and will always be free to use, but the AI coding agent does have usage limits.
VS Code is very customizable and allows you to install new themes and extensions - we will have you install the Copilot extension, but you install others if you want to.
Copilot CLI
(Optionally) Install Copilot CLI
I will briefly cover this as some of you might "vibe" with it, but it's a terminal based way of doing the same sort of workflow, but it's more abstracted - you don't edit the code, you just write the prompts. This will feel more similar to Replit in that fashion. This is similar to OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, or OpenCode, just the GitHub version of it. This will be brief as most of you will probably want to stick to VS Code.
This is definitely optional to install. If you feel comfortable with the terminal, go for it, otherwise you can skip doing this. We'll demonstrate this to you, but no worries if you don't install it yourself.
