The AI Engineer YouTube channel just crossed one million subscribers. Thank you to everyone who’s watched a talk, sent one to a teammate, or put something they learned into production. For this special, we wanted to sit down with someone who has to answer a question a lot of us are asking at work: what should a software engineer actually learn now?

Mihail Eric has two places to test his answer. He teaches The Modern Software Developer at Stanford and leads AI at Monaco, where his colleagues use coding agents to ship software and investigate outages. I asked him to take us through the syllabus, then tell us which parts survived contact with his own engineering team.

This is also meant as a preview for all of you joining us in San Francisco for AIE Code next week, as required knowledge for all the conversations with the speakers, sponsors and attendees you’re about to have. If you can see this as a LS subscriber and haven’t got a ticket yet, you can use this code for 30% off (no refunds, sorry)