Coding agents are increasingly used to automate software tasks, yet how they actually work is often treated as a black box. This talk breaks a coding agent down into its core mechanics: how it is structured, how it communicates with a language model, and how a text-only model can read and modify real source code.

We will cover:

- what a coding agent is, mechanically
- how agents communicate with language models
- how tools and MCP calls are executed
- how a text-only model works with source code
- how to build a basic coding agent in C#

Consists of presentations and hands-on demonstrations using this open-source project of mine: https://github.com/tndata/CodingAgentExplorer