AI Engineering · 300-level
Agent Foundations
AIE-3013 creditscorebadge: agent-iprereqs: AIE-201, AIE-204
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What's inside
Sections & lessons
01
Planner-executor loop
- The core loop: plan, act, observe, re-planconcept45 min
02
Stop conditions & tool-call budgets
- Designing the ceiling that keeps an agent from burning spendconcept60 min
03
Reading a trace
- Plan → tool call → observation → next plan, as a scrubbable timelineconcept60 min
04
Trace Detective lab
- Finding the exact step where the agent brokeconcept90 min
05
Designing an agent persona
- Persona, tool allowlist, and budget as one definitionconcept45 min
06
Adversarial loop-inducing tasks
- Five tasks built to make a weak stop condition fail visiblyconcept60 min
07
Human-in-the-loop approval gates
- Where an agent must stop and askconcept45 min
08
Reasoning inside agent steps
- Editing one reasoning step and watching the plan forkconcept60 min
09
Quiz: agent-loop judgment
- Checkpoint on stop conditions and budget designconcept30 min
010
Budget-ticker lab
- Catching a runaway agent before the step budget hits zeroconcept90 min
011
Build-your-own-agent lab
- Defining and running a first end-to-end agentconcept90 min
012
Lab + eval-gate: agent + adversarial suite
- Pass all five loop-inducing tasks (Agent I badge)concept120 min
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Optional · watch & try
Go deeper, elsewhere
Hand-picked public explainers and open tools — always optional, never required, never graded.
AI Agents, Clearly ExplainedClean mental model of the plan-act-observe agent loop AI agents explained: Build your first agent in 8 minutesHands-on build of a minimal working agent · ~8 minAI Agents Explained - How They Actually WorkBreaks down planner/executor and tool-call loops AgentSwarms — Learn Agentic AI Hands-OnFree interactive playground for building and observing agent behavior
This module ends in a gate you can fail.
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