Setup

Choose one setup option and follow the steps.

1. Prerequisites

• GitHub account
• Active GitHub Copilot or Claude Code license

2. Open the course in GitHub Codespaces

Click the badge and confirm Create codespace using the default settings:

IMPORTANT

GitHub Codespaces free tier includes up to 60 hours per month. Make sure to delete your codespace when you are done to avoid exceeding the free tier limit. You can see all your Codespaces at https://github.com/codespaces.

Note that GitHub may ask for a payment method purely for verification to unlock Codespaces, even on the free tier.

3. Setup AI tool

Choose one of the following:

• GitHub Copilot (Built-in): GitHub Copilot is built into GitHub Codespaces. Simply sign in with your GitHub account to use it.
• Claude Code: To setup Claude Code, follow the Claude Code Quickstart guide. Be aware that Claude Code only provides a command-line interface (CLI) in Codespaces.

4. Run the application

Using task you can run the application from the terminal:

task run

After your application successfully started, you should be able to access the Swagger UI at .../swagger-ui/index.html on the forwarded Codespaces URL.

5. Agent token (optional)

Set up a token once, so every agent run and every new terminal is already logged in.

NOTE

You only need this step if you attend the advanced course on day two. If you only attend the foundation course on day one, you can skip it.

Create a token

Create a fine-grained personal access token with your personal account as resource owner (the permission is hidden for organizations) and, under Account permissions, set Copilot Requests to Read-only. Classic tokens (ghp_…) don't work with Copilot CLI. The variable name is COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN.

See Authenticating GitHub Copilot CLI for details.

Store it

Store the token as a Codespaces secret, so every new Codespace has it, including the one you open for each lab:

1. Open github.com/settings/codespaces and click New secret.
2. Use the variable name from above as Name, and paste the token as Value.
3. Under Repository access, select Zuehlke/ai-augmented-software-engineering.

Codespaces only pick up a new secret when they start, so restart a Codespace that is already running.

Check it

This prints set, never the token itself:

echo ${CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN:+set} ${COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN:+set}