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Build Your First AI Agent · the hands-on course

Build your first AI agent
— for real.

Not a chat window with tools. A program that watches for work, decides, acts, and proves it did it — while you're not at the keyboard. You'll build every line of it yourself.

You've learned to drive an AI coding assistant. It does remarkable things — as long as you're sitting there. Close the laptop and everything stops.

An agent is what closes that gap: a loop that perceives the state of the world, decides what to do, does it, and verifies the result — unattended, on a schedule, on a trigger, at 3 a.m. The difference between a chatbot and an agent isn't the model. It's the scaffolding around the model, and the scaffolding is plain, testable code you can absolutely write.

We run a multi-agent system in production every day. This course is the patterns it runs on — queues, safety rails, verification, failure recovery — sanitized, made generic, and taught from scratch, one working layer at a time. Nothing speculative: every pattern in here exists because its absence caused a real failure first.

What you build

One agent, hardened module by module

You build a real agent in Module 2 — about 130 lines of Python, no frameworks, standard library only — and then spend the rest of the course turning it into something you can trust unattended: tools behind allowlists and human gates, crash-safe file queues, idempotent actions, cron and webhook triggers, verifiers that catch the model lying about success, retries, dead-letter queues, and a kill switch.

The capstone is an inbox-to-action agent: it watches an inbox, classifies every message, drafts replies, and queues them for your approval before anything leaves the machine. Support inboxes, lead inboxes, ops requests — it's the most broadly useful agent shape there is, and its worst possible failure is a bad draft a human declines.

The code targets any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — hosted providers and local servers like Ollama alike. Two environment variables and it runs.

Exactly what you get

Ten modules. Four exercises.
Real code in every one.

  1. What an agent actually isThe loop (perceive → decide → act → verify), agent vs chatbot, and the five cases where you shouldn't build an agent at all.
  2. Your first loopA minimal working agent: task watcher, LLM call, action, log — complete runnable Python, stdlib only.
  3. Tools and actionsFunction calling with the three rails that must ship in the same commit: allowlists, dry-run mode, confirmation gates.
  4. Memory and stateFile-based memory, crash-safe task queues, idempotency — and surviving kill -9 without double-doing work.
  5. Scheduling and triggersCron, file-watchers, webhooks, event loops. When each fits, with working code and a real crontab.
  6. Verification disciplineThe make-it-not-lie chapter. Verify with commands, write falsification tests, never trust the model's claim it succeeded.
  7. Failure and recoveryRetries with backoff and jitter, dead-letter queues, alerting a human rarely and loudly, and the kill switch.
  8. Multi-agent basicsProducer/consumer pairs, one owner per file, message passing through queues — and why shared state kills systems.
  9. Ship a real oneThe capstone: the inbox-to-action agent with a human approval gate. Full architecture, code skeleton, staged bring-up.
  10. Where to go nextThe upgrade ladder, the whole course compressed to one card of patterns, and how the pros run fleets.

Plus four hands-on exercises — matching modules 2, 3, 6 and 9. Each ends in acceptance criteria: a literal command whose output proves you did it. In exercise three you make the model claim success falsely on purpose — and catch it. Not "try this and see" — a pass condition.

This is for you if

  • You've finished a Claude Code basics course (ours or anyone's) or the free 5-day course, and you want the next real step
  • You can read and run Python, even if most of yours was written with an AI's help
  • You want something running while you're NOT at the keyboard — on a schedule, on a trigger, unattended
  • You've tried an agent framework tutorial and came out with a demo you couldn't debug or trust
  • You'd rather understand 130 lines you wrote than configure 13,000 lines you didn't

And it is not for you if you've never touched a terminal, or you want a no-code tool. You will write and run code in every module — that's the product.

Read this before you buy

It's written, not filmed. On purpose.

No videos, no drip schedule, no learning platform, no login to lose. Ten markdown modules and four exercises, delivered instantly as plain files. You can grep them, paste them into your terminal, and drop the whole course into your agent's own context and ask it questions about itself. You can't do any of that with a video library.

If what you want is a talking head and a progress bar, this is genuinely the wrong product and we'd rather tell you now than refund you later.

Honest status · July 2026

v1 is complete and delivered instantly. It will keep growing.

All ten modules and all four exercises are written and delivered the moment you pay. Nothing "coming soon," no future cohort. And when we work out something new in production worth teaching, it gets added — every update free, forever. You bought the course, not the snapshot.

Instant access
$97
Ten modules, four exercises, lifetime updates. Download the markdown, keep it forever.
Instant delivery to your inbox · 7-day no-questions refund
Bring your own LLM API key — works with any OpenAI-compatible provider or local model.

What it will not do for you

It will not make you money, and we won't put a number on this page — anyone who does is selling you a lottery ticket and calling it a skill.

What it sells is a capability: the ability to design, build, and operate a small autonomous agent that acts safely, survives crashes, and never gets to grade its own homework. What you build with that is on you.

We don't sell theory. We sell what we run. — Hive Dynamics

Questions

FAQ

Do I need to be a professional programmer?

No. If you can read and run Python and follow terminal commands — the level you reach after any Claude Code basics course or a few months of AI-assisted building — you're ready. Every module ships complete, commented, runnable code.

Which AI provider does the course use?

Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. The code targets the standard /v1/chat/completions interface, so it runs unchanged against most hosted providers and local servers like Ollama or vLLM. You set two environment variables and everything works. You use your own API key.

Is this videos or text?

Written, on purpose. Ten markdown modules and four exercises you can grep, paste into a terminal, and drop into your agent's own context. Delivered instantly as a zip of plain markdown files, plus readable online.

Will this make me money?

We make no income claims — anyone who does is selling you a lottery ticket. This course sells a capability: designing, building, and operating a small autonomous agent that verifies its own work. What you build with that capability is up to you.

How is this different from an agent framework tutorial?

No frameworks. You build the loop, the queues, the safety rails, and the verifiers from primitives, so you understand and can debug every line. Module 10 covers when and how to adopt frameworks afterward — from a position of understanding, not dependence.

What if it's not for me?

7-day no-questions refund. Email us and it's done.

The ladder

Where this sits

The Blueprint teaches you to run the assistant. This course is where you build something that runs without you. The full course is the whole operating system.