GitHub Certified: Agentic AI Developer study guide
GitHub Certified: Agentic AI Developer · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
GitHub Agentic AI Developer is one of the credentials in the GitHub Certification Program, delivered through Pearson VUE either at an authorized test center or under online proctoring. GitHub describes the exam as validating your ability to operate, supervise, and govern autonomous AI agents within GitHub-driven SDLC workflows - configuration, evaluation, and orchestration of agentic systems in production environments, with safe, reliable, and efficient software delivery as the goal. The GitHub Certified: Agentic AI Developer study guide has 5 sections and about 1,715 words.
01Operations and Supervision of Autonomous AI Agents in GitHub-Driven SDLC Workflows
In a GitHub-driven SDLC, an agent's blast radius is defined by what it can touch: a branch, a pull request, an issue, a workflow run. Supervision means deciding before the run which of those the agent may write to and which require a human.
375 words, about 2 min02Configuration of Agentic Systems
Everything that shapes agent behaviour should be versioned in the repository and reviewed like code: instruction files (repo conventions, build and test commands, "do not touch" paths), custom agent definitions, the tools and MCP servers an agent may call, workflow YAML permission blocks, and environment protection rules. Configuration drift is the most common cause of "it worked last week".
316 words, about 2 min03Evaluation of Agent Behavior and Output Quality
An evaluation is a test suite for behaviour. Start with a written rubric: task success, tests passing, diff minimality, adherence to repository conventions, volume of human review comments, cost, and safety violations.
342 words, about 2 min04Orchestration of Agents in Production Environments
Orchestration is the scheduling, isolation, and sequencing layer around the agents. Each task gets its own branch and workspace so two agents never edit the same file concurrently; the pull request is the durable state, so a crashed worker can be resumed or handed to a human.
334 words, about 2 min05Governance, Safety, and Reliable Delivery with Agents
An agent acts under a human's or an organisation's identity, and the approving human owns the outcome. Governance therefore needs named owners per agent, a documented purpose and scope, least-privilege credentials, and an audit trail that answers "what produced this commit and who approved it" - commit provenance, PR history, and the organisation audit log.
348 words, about 2 min