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Thinking with Agents (UVM Agentic AI Bootcamp)

  • Author/Source: Erkmen G. Aslim & Emily Beam (Department of Economics, University of Vermont)
  • Original: thinkingwithagents.github.io — landing page for a two-session agentic-AI bootcamp delivered at UVM in April 2026, with companion slide PDFs, prep guide, and an applications gallery of reusable skills

Key Ideas

  • A two-session agentic-AI bootcamp for economists, hosted by the UVM Department of Economics. Session 1 (April 22, "Getting Started with AI Tools") is the conceptual on-ramp; Session 2 (April 27, "Research Workflows, Teaching & Applications") is the applied demo of reusable skills on a live paper.
  • No installation required to attend — the prep guide (Getting Set Up) handles install for those who want to follow along, and an Outside Resources page collects further reading.
  • Session 1 covers the core agentic concepts: chat AI vs. agentic tools, the context window, standing instructions, planning, voice files, skills, and live demos (website redesign + custom skill creation). Detailed in agentic-bootcamp-1-aslim-beam.
  • Session 2 is the applied half, organized around two streams: Emily on research workflows (auditing a replication package with /code-review, paper auditing with /econ-audit and /review-paper, running Lee bounds live), and Erkmen on teaching & applications (lecture-builder skill via /academic-beamer-deck, idea stress-testing with /research-brainstorm, web scraping with /find-data). Detailed in agentic-bootcamp-2-aslim-beam.
  • "What to try next" homework is concrete and low-stakes: try a data-exploration → analysis-plan workflow on your own data, draft an assignment, run /econ-audit on a paper before submission, or use Claude Code to revise a draft.
  • Skills are distributed as an installable bundle — npx skills add thinkingwithagents/skills pulls the full economist pack; individual skills can be added with --skill <name>. This makes the bootcamp's playbooks reusable across institutions, not just UVM.

Summary

This is the landing page for Thinking with Agents, a two-session agentic-AI bootcamp run by Erkmen G. Aslim and Emily Beam at the University of Vermont's Department of Economics in April 2026. The page is a thin index — its real content lives in the two slide decks (linked) and a separate applications gallery where each /-named skill (e.g., /code-review, /econ-audit, /research-brainstorm, /find-data, /academic-beamer-deck) gets its own page with the SKILL.md spec and a usage walkthrough.

The pedagogical structure is "concepts first, applications second." Session 1 takes attendees from chat-AI to agentic tools, introduces the context window as the load-bearing concept, walks through planning files, and lands on safety/permissions. Session 2 then demos those concepts on a real paper-in-progress (a Bangladesh remote-education RCT) — code audit, adversarial paper review, and a live "do Lee bounds" exercise from referee comment to results — followed by a teaching-side build of a lecture-builder skill via /skill-creator.

The site is positioned as a course-in-a-box: anyone can install the skill bundle, run through the prep guide, and replicate the bootcamp at their own institution. It is the closest thing in the wiki to a turn-key agentic-AI-for-economists curriculum.

Relevance to Economics Research

Most "AI for economists" resources in the wiki are individual posts or talks. Thinking with Agents is unusual because it ships executable infrastructure — installable skills with versioned SKILL.md files — alongside the slides. For a faculty member running an internal AI workshop, this is a near-complete starter kit: two 90-minute sessions of slides, a prep guide, an outside-resources reading list, and a one-line install for the skills demoed. The bootcamp also models a realistic adoption arc (concepts → research workflows → teaching tools), making it useful both as a curriculum to copy and as a pattern for what to teach in what order.