On February 25, Studio 225, home to UGA’s Entrepreneurship Program, turned into a real-time showcase for what creating with the latest AI tools actually looks like.
At the Agentic Coding Spectacular, NMI faculty Chris Gerlach and John Weatherford went head-to-head before a live audience in a one-hour sprint to build a working student assignment tracker app.
Using tools like Claude Code and GPT Codex, ideas from the crowd became functional prototypes in real time. Features were added. Pivots happened. The app evolved on the fly. Think part demo, part improv, part “wait…you can do that?!”
For students, the takeaway was clear: AI isn’t replacing builders. It’s accelerating them. As John told the room, the limiting factor isn’t coding ability – it’s the flexibility to see what’s possible. Whether validating a startup idea, prototyping for a class, or pressure-testing a side project, the barrier to building has never been lower.
Resources discussed in the talk are available at bit.ly/agentic-uga.