Build Your Own AI Agent — the Loop, the Tools, and MCP (Season 1)
About Course
You have used an AI agent. Now build one.
In this course we write the agent loop by hand, in Python, with no framework. We give it
tools, let it touch a real machine behind a permission layer, teach it to recover when things
go wrong, put it on MCP so anything can talk to it, manage its context and cost, and finally
write evals that tell you whether a change made it better or worse.
By the end you will have built Rover: a working terminal coding agent, and the judgement to
know what it should and should not be trusted with.
What you will learn
- Write an agent loop from scratch, with no framework
- Design tools the model chooses correctly, and debug it when it does not
- Give an agent safe access to files and a shell behind a permission layer
- Recover from runaway loops, false finishes, and every stop reason that matters
- Build an MCP server and an MCP client, and explain the protocol underneath
- Manage context, caching, and memory so a long session stays sharp
- Write evals that tell you whether a change helped
Requirements
- Comfortable in a terminal, and able to read and write code in some language
- Python 3.10 or newer, and an editor
- An Anthropic API key (a small amount of credit covers the whole course)
- No prior experience with agents or MCP
Who this is for
- Developers who have used coding agents and want to know how they work
- Anyone building an internal tool on top of an LLM and hitting the limits
- Engineers who need to review or maintain agent code somebody else wrote
Course Content
Module 1 — An agent is a loop
Module 2 — Tools: teaching the model what it can do
Module 3 — Letting it touch your machine
Module 4 — When the loop goes wrong
Module 5 — MCP: the protocol under the tools
Module 6 — Context: the resource you are actually managing
Module 7 — Proving it works, and what it costs
Student Ratings & Reviews
No Review Yet