No prior agent experience assumed
Start with one delegation. End ready to trust it.
This is a hands-on path for engineers who have not used Droid, or any coding agent, in a codebase where mistakes are expensive. You change one thing at a time, see what it does, and learn why each control exists before you need it.
A terminal, Node 20, and a Factory account. No AI background needed.
Every control you add, you then try to get around. That is how you find out what it is worth.
A scoreboard that shows what each change bought, which is the thing a risk reviewer will ask for.
The only mental model you need first
You describe an outcome. Droid decides the steps, and the harness decides what it may do.
Droid is an agent. You give it a task in plain language. It reads the repository, picks a tool (read a file, edit one, run a command), looks at the result and picks again, until the task is done or it needs you. Everything it did is recorded in the session.
droid "Document POST /transfers in docs/api.md"
The harness is everything around the model: what it reads before it starts, what it may do without asking, and what it cannot do at all. Most of this workshop is about the harness, because that is the part you control.
- session
- One task, start to finish: every prompt, tool call and result. Resume it, fork it, audit it.
- tool call
- One action: Read, Edit, Create, Execute a command, or an MCP tool. The real record of what happened.
- autonomy
- Off, Low, Medium or High: what runs without asking you first. Ctrl+L to change it.
- harness
- AGENTS.md, settings, rules, hooks, skills, droids and MCP. Files in your repo, versioned and reviewable.
Your path
Build trust one working layer at a time.
Do these in order. Each stage assumes only what the previous one taught.
Make your first delegation
Install Droid, give it one small task in the Larkspur repo, and read what it did: every file it read, every command it ran, every approval it asked for.25 min →02Tell it what matters
Write the AGENTS.md every session starts from: the exact commands, the invariants, and what must never happen. Watch five tasks improve.35 min →03See the decision before the diff
Use Spec mode to review a plan in one sentence, which is where the March incident would have been obvious.30 min →04Decide what it may do on its own
Set autonomy, write permission rules, and add hooks that block changes to the protected paths and catch the ones that slip through, so the rule is enforced, not just requested.85 min →05Let it run without you
Package judgment as skills and reviewers, connect real systems over MCP, run Droid in CI, and plan a Mission.4 hrs →Short on time? The playground needs nothing installed, and the Larkspur mission walks the same decisions without running Droid at all.