How to cCompare AI coding workshops from OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft
Start by separating two different needs. The first is product knowledge: what the tool does, which settings exist, how the API behaves. The second is working practice: how a team of thirty changes its review process, its repo standards, and its definition of done.
Vendor programmes are excellent at the first and structurally weak at the second. They cannot recommend a competitor's tool for a task theirs handles poorly, and they have no visibility into your codebase or your review culture.
What each one is actually good for
- OpenAI. Deepest source on Codex and the API surface. If you have standardised on Codex, their material is the most current thing available and it costs you nothing. Weak on how Codex fits alongside other tools, because that is not their job.
- Google. Strongest when your stack is already on their cloud. The training assumes that context, which is efficient if it is true and largely irrelevant if it is not.
- Microsoft. The most enterprise-shaped of the three, with the deepest ties into GitHub and the tooling most large organisations already run. Best coverage of admin, policy, and rollout mechanics. Content leans towards Copilot, unsurprisingly.
All three publish free documentation and courses that are better than most paid third-party courses. Read them before you buy anything. We tell clients this before we quote.
Where vendor training stops
Four things it will not do for you.
It will not work in your repository. Vendor sessions use prepared material, so the specific way your monorepo breaks an agent's context handling never comes up.
It will not tell you where the tool is bad. Every product has tasks it handles poorly. That knowledge is what saves a team from three wasted weeks, and no vendor curriculum contains it.
It will not change your process. The hard part of adoption is review capacity, task sizing, and who is accountable for an agent-authored change. That is organisational work, not product work.
It will not answer cross-tool questions. Many teams end up running two or three agents for different jobs. Nobody with a product to sell will help you draw that line.
Being straight about our own bias
We sell independent training, so read the section above with that in mind. Here is the honest split we recommend: send the team through the vendor's free material first, then spend money on the practice layer only if you have a real problem. A team of six that is already shipping fine does not need us. A team of forty with review queues backing up and no repo standards does.
Harness Institute is two working engineers, Rogier in Amsterdam and Vasilis in Athens, and we train across Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex because clients run all three. Over a hundred teams so far.
What to do next
Write down the problem in one sentence. If it starts with "we do not know how to use", take the vendor course. If it starts with "our process broke when", that is not a product knowledge gap and no vendor programme will close it.