AI Agents Explained: How They Work & Build Your Own

About this course

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

AI agents are the biggest shift in how we work since the internet — software that doesn't just answer questions, but perceives, decides, and acts to get things done. This course takes you from curious beginner to confident agent builder, with zero coding required.

You'll start by understanding exactly what AI agents are (and what they're not), then take apart how they work: the five ingredients every agent shares, the six types of agents from simple reflex to modern LLM agents, and the reasoning patterns — ReAct, ReWoo, chaining, routing, orchestration — that make them smart. You'll learn to teach agents with system prompts, few-shot examples, chain-of-thought reasoning, memory systems, and context engineering.

Then you'll build. Three complete, guided, no-code projects: a research agent in n8n that briefs you every Monday morning, a personal AI chief of staff in Google AI Studio, and a team of specialist agents (researcher, writer, critic) that collaborate on real work. You'll connect everything with MCP, the open standard for agent tools, and you'll learn the professional disciplines — guardrails, evaluations, cost control, security — that make agents trustworthy.

Every section includes hands-on exercises using free tiers (ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Studio, n8n). Your guide throughout is NOVA, our robot co-pilot, who keeps things fun while you do serious building.

By the end, you won't just understand AI agents — you'll have three working ones, a trust charter, and a 30-day action plan to put them to work.

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