Syllabus
AI 3010, advancedAI 3010: Building and Working with Agents — Part I
Fall Semester 2026
Course description
An advanced course on building and deploying production-grade, cloud-based agents. It starts with a hands-on agent harness written from scratch, then moves into frameworks — LangChain, CrewAI and Azure AI Foundry — and multi-agent orchestration, in service of Amadeus' longer-term software factory ambition. This is the first of a two-part series.
- Prerequisites
- None. This course is open to anyone.
- Assumed knowledge
- Advanced — assumes you are comfortable building and deploying software.
- Sessions
- 5 sessions of 60 minutes, each delivered twice — once per hemisphere — and recorded.
Course outcomes and objectives
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Build an agent harness from scratch, and explain what every framework is doing for you
- Work in LangChain, CrewAI and Azure AI Foundry, and choose between them for a given job
- Orchestrate several agents on one problem
- Deploy an agent to the cloud in a shape fit for production
How this course runs
The course is deliberately bottom-up. Before any framework appears, participants build an agent harness by hand — the loop, the tool calls, the state — because every framework that follows is then recognisable rather than magic.
From there it moves to the frameworks a production agent is actually likely to be built on, and to orchestrating more than one agent on a single problem. The through-line is Amadeus’ software factory ambition: agents that do real work in a real pipeline, not demonstrations.
Sessions run fortnightly, in the weeks AI 1010 and AI 2010 do not, so this course can be taken alongside either. Part II follows in a later semester.
This course is bottom-up on purpose: the agent harness is built by hand before any framework appears. That means you will be writing and deploying code throughout, and you need an environment you can deploy from.
Sessions fall in the weeks AI 1010 and AI 2010 do not, so this course can be taken alongside either. Every session is recorded and published afterwards with its notes, so a session you cannot attend at either sitting is still a session you can take in full. Part II follows in a later semester.
Course requirements
The requirements for this course have not been published yet.
Required and recommended readings
No readings have been set for this course. Material published for the course as a whole is listed on the course page, and each session carries its own handouts.
Grading scale
The grading scale for this course has not been published yet.
University policies
The institutional policies that apply to this course have not been linked yet.
Preliminary course schedule
One row per session, dated by its western sitting. Every session is delivered twice, and the session page carries both sitting times with their time zones.
| Date | Topic / discussion | Due dates |
|---|---|---|
| PLACEHOLDER(program) — topic of session 1 | Nothing due | |
| PLACEHOLDER(program) — topic of session 2 | Nothing due | |
| PLACEHOLDER(program) — topic of session 3 | Nothing due | |
| PLACEHOLDER(program) — topic of session 4 | Nothing due | |
| PLACEHOLDER(program) — topic of session 5 | Nothing due |