04

No Hype AI: Agentic AI

Understand and build AI agents — autonomous systems that plan, act, and learn from their environment.

10 lessons • 5 supplemental references

01
What Are AI Agents?

What separates an agent from a chatbot — the three capabilities (planning, tool use, memory) that make AI autonomous, with real-world examples.

30 min • beginner
02
Agent Architectures

The core agent loops — ReAct, Plan-and-Execute, and Reflexion — with diagrams, pseudocode, and the trade-offs between them.

40 min • beginner
03
Tool Use — Giving Agents Hands

How agents act on the world: function calling, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), APIs, databases, and robust tool-schema design.

45 min • intermediate
04
Memory Systems

The four kinds of agent memory — short-term, long-term, episodic, and semantic — and how to architect them.

45 min • intermediate
05
Planning & Reasoning

Chain-of-thought, tree-of-thought, and goal decomposition — prompting agents to plan and to re-plan when the environment changes.

45 min • intermediate
06
Building Your First Agent

Hands-on: build a complete working agent with Claude's tool use — the implementation loop, edge cases, and testing on real tasks.

60 min • intermediate
07
Agent Safety & Guardrails

The safety layers every agent needs — sandboxing, approval loops, resource limits, and output validation — with failure case studies.

45 min • intermediate
08
Evaluating Agent Performance

Measuring agents beyond accuracy: task completion, efficiency, cost, reliability, and benchmarks like SWE-bench, GAIA, and WebArena.

45 min • advanced
09
Real-World Agent Patterns

A pattern catalogue by domain — coding, research, and data agents — their tool sets, prompting strategies, and failure modes.

50 min • advanced
10
The Future of Agents

Open problems and what comes next: long-horizon planning, multi-modal agents, agent collaboration, and emerging standards like MCP.

35 min • advanced