Google and Kaggle relaunch their free 5-day AI Agents course, now built on vibe coding

Google and Kaggle have brought back their AI Agents Intensive — the free, five-day crash course that drew more than 1.5 million learners when it first ran in November 2025 — and this edition is rebuilt around a single idea: vibe coding. The 2026 run took place June 15-19, and its capstone project is still open, with submissions due June 30 at 11:59 PM PT.

What changed

The headline shift is the framing. In this course, "vibe coding" means natural language replaces traditional code as the primary interface for building AI agents — you describe what you want the agent to do, and a coding assistant fills in the implementation. Google frames this as lowering the barrier for people without a formal programming background, which is exactly the audience that has been pouring into agent-building over the past year.

The course is developed by Google researchers and engineers and hosted on Kaggle, with product leads Anant Nawalgaria and Frank Guan among the speakers. Each of the five days pairs theory with hands-on coding, moving from foundational concepts through deployment, and the recurring theme is building what the curriculum calls "10x agents" by wiring up tools and APIs.

What you actually do

The structure is the same proven format that made the first edition popular: daily lessons, code labs you run yourself, and a graded capstone at the end. To participate you need two free accounts — a phone-verified Kaggle account and a Google AI Studio account. The capstone went live at the close of day five on June 19; finish it and you earn a badge and certificate on your Kaggle profile, with standout submissions getting Kaggle swag and social recognition.

Because the capstone window runs through June 30, the course materials and labs are still worth grabbing now even though the live cohort has wrapped. The lessons remain available, and the capstone gives you a concrete, gradeable target rather than an open-ended "go build something."

Why it matters for people learning to build

Two things stand out. First, scale: a free course from Google that previously reached seven figures of learners is a meaningful on-ramp, and reframing it around natural-language workflows signals where the on-ramp is heading. Second, the vocabulary. "Vibe coding" started as a half-joking label for letting an AI write most of the code while you steer with prompts; seeing it become the organizing principle of a major Google-backed curriculum is a sign the practice is moving from meme to method.

The honest caveat — and one the course's own emphasis on tools, APIs, and deployment reinforces — is that vibe coding gets you a working draft fast, but shipping a reliable agent still demands the unglamorous parts: clear tool definitions, tested edge cases, and guardrails. A natural-language interface lowers the cost of the first version; it doesn't remove the need to understand what the agent is doing. Used that way, a free five-day intensive is a strong place to start.

If you want to take part, the capstone and lessons live on the Kaggle competition page.