The Context Course

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The Context Course teaches you context engineering for code agents — the skill of giving agents the right knowledge, tools, and structure to do their best work. Whether you're using Claude Code, Codex, or open source agents, this course will help you get dramatically more out of them.

The course covers the full context engineering stack: skills, MCP, plugins, subagents, and even building your own agent from scratch.

Sign up here (it's free) 👉 Follow the Context Course org on Hugging Face

Unit	Topic	Description
0	Welcome & Onboarding	Set up your tools, join the community, and get oriented.
1	Skills: Portable Knowledge	Learn to write, use, and share agent skills — portable instructions that make agents expert at specific tasks.
2	MCP: The Model Context Protocol	Build MCP servers that give agents dynamic access to external tools and data.
3	Plugins: Bundling for Distribution	Package skills and MCP servers into plugins that work across agent platforms.
4	Subagents: Multi-Agent Workflows	Orchestrate complex tasks by spawning specialized child agents.
5	Hooks: Observing and Guarding the Lifecycle	Use hooks to log, block, or automate around every step the agent takes — then visualize it live in Gradio.
6	Bonus: Nano Harness	Build your own minimal agent from scratch to understand how it all works under the hood.

Prerequisites

• Basic familiarity with Python and the command line
• A Hugging Face account (hf.co/join)
• Access to a code agent: Claude Code, Codex, or an open source alternative

Reference Agents

This edition keeps the examples consistent by following three reference agents end-to-end:

• Claude Code — claude in your terminal
• Codex — codex CLI from OpenAI
• OpenCode — opencode from opencode.ai

If you use Cursor or GitHub Copilot, the concepts in the course still transfer, but their MCP and extension workflows are not covered step-by-step in this edition.

Quick Start

# 1. Clone the course
git clone https://github.com/huggingface/context-course.git
cd context-course

# 2. Install the HF CLI
curl -LsSf https://hf.co/cli/install.sh | bash
hf auth login

# 3. Start with Unit 0
# Open units/en/unit0/introduction.mdx

Certification

Certificate	Requirements
Context Fundamentals	Pass the Unit 1 and Unit 2 quizzes
Context Engineering	Pass all quizzes + complete a hands-on project

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

• Found a bug? Open an issue
• Want to improve content? Submit a PR
• Want to add a unit? Open an issue first to discuss

Citing the Course

@misc{context-course,
  author = {Burtenshaw, Ben},
  title = {The Context Course: Context Engineering for Code Agents},
  year = {2025},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/huggingface/context-course}},
  note = {GitHub repository},
}