Full course coming soon

Designing Safe and Effective AI Agent Systems

7 chapters · 32 lessons

1. 1. Agent Architecture Fundamentals

   4 lessons

   Understand the components that distinguish agents from chatbots: goals, planning, tools, memory, and control loops.

2. 2. Tool Design and Permission Scoping

   5 lessons

   Learn to expose capabilities to agents through well-defined tools with appropriate access boundaries.

3. 3. Environment Isolation and Sandboxing

   4 lessons

   Build safe testing and production environments where agent mistakes cannot cascade into operational incidents.

4. 4. Policy Enforcement Beyond Prompts

   5 lessons

   Implement system-level guardrails that constrain agent behavior regardless of model interpretation.

5. 5. Observability, Logging, and Audit Trails

   4 lessons

   Instrument agent systems to understand what happened, why, and how to recover from failures.

6. 6. Evaluating Agent Behavior and Robustness

   5 lessons

   Test agents not only for task completion but also for refusal, boundary respect, and recovery under ambiguity.

7. 7. Production Patterns and Real-World Case Studies

   5 lessons

   Apply agent design principles to software engineering, operations, and security use cases with constrained autonomy.