SophiArch
AdvancedAI403

Building Production AI Agents

For engineers who have built LLM applications and RAG systems and now need to ship agents that work. An agent is a model plus a harness — the tools, permissions, memory, loop and checks around it — and this course teaches harness engineering: the agent loop, tool schema and error design, MCP and agent skills, persistent memory and context compaction, when a multi-agent design is worth its cost, handoffs, trajectory evaluation and execution-based verification, tool-layer security against indirect prompt injection, loop and cost budgets, and a capstone audit of an AI-built agent.

Lessons are AI-assisted and human-reviewed. Learn more.

Syllabus

Agent Foundations

01
What Makes a System an Agent — and When You Don't Need OneFree preview
30 min
02
The Agent Loop: Plan, Act, Observe, Decide
35 min
03
Tool Design Is the Real Lever: Schemas, Errors, and What a Call Returns
40 min
04
MCP and Agent Skills: Standard Interfaces for Tools and Know-How
40 min

State & Memory

05
Persistent Memory: What to Store, Where It Came From, When to Re-Check It
40 min
06
Context Compaction and What Gets Lost Across Long Tasks
35 min

Orchestration

07
Single Agent vs. Multi-Agent: A Decision Procedure
40 min
08
Handoffs, Delegation, and Where Context Is Lost
35 min

Evaluation & Reliability

09
Why Observability Isn't Evaluation
30 min
10
Execution-Based Verification and Trajectory Evals
40 min

Security & Control

11
Every Tool Is an Attack Surface: Permissions, Untrusted Output, and Confirmation Gates
45 min
12
Loop Depth, Tool Budgets, and Cost per Resolved Task
35 min
13
Auditing an AI-Built Agent: Capstone
50 min