GitHub: From Zero to Pull Request

Overview

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Learn Git and GitHub from the ground up, then apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents to automate development workflows. This course takes you from installing Git and creating your first repository to submitting pull requests, contributing to open source, and building custom AI agents with Model Context Protocol (MCP). You will start with Git fundamentals: initializing repositories, staging and committing changes, and safely undoing work with revert and reset. From there, you will connect local repositories to GitHub using push, pull, and clone, and learn to collaborate through branching, pull requests, and code review. The course covers community workflows including forking, issue tracking, and automating Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines with GitHub Actions. You will also configure gitignore patterns to keep sensitive files out of version control and write effective README documentation in Markdown. The final module introduces AI agents on GitHub: the progression from code-completion assistants to autonomous agents, how agents interact with repositories and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) through tool execution, task selection criteria, security boundaries, and building custom agents that connect to external tools via MCP.

Syllabus

Git Foundations

Covers Git version control fundamentals, repository initialization, staging and committing, undoing changes, connecting to GitHub, and synchronizing with remote repositories via push, pull, and clone.

GitHub Collaboration

Covers branching strategies, pull request workflows, forking for open source contribution, issue tracking, GitHub Actions for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), gitignore configuration, and README documentation.

AI Agents on GitHub

Covers the evolution from AI assistants to autonomous agents, how GitHub agents interact with repositories and tools, task selection criteria for agent automation, agent security and permission boundaries, and building custom agents with Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Capstone Project

A culminating project that integrates Git fundamentals, GitHub collaboration workflows, and AI agent capabilities into a complete development workflow, evaluated against real-world team collaboration standards.