All topic hubs

Reliable agents learning hub

AI Agents, Reliability, and Safety

An AI agent is a controlled system around a model, not an autonomous model by itself. Reliable agents need typed tools, bounded loops, explicit state, least-privilege authority, verification, trace evidence, terminal conditions, and recovery from partial or ambiguous effects.

Best for: Engineers designing tool-using agents and production automation

Recommended learning order

  1. 1Agentic AIReasoning loops, tools, and multi-agent systems.Open lesson
  2. 2Agent State, Memory & OrchestrationState graphs, checkpoints, working and semantic memory, durable workflows, interrupts, and multi-agent routing.Open lesson
  3. 3Model Context Protocol (MCP)Clients, servers, tools, resources, prompts, transports, capability negotiation, authorization, and safe execution.Open lesson
  4. 4Loop EngineeringBounded state machines, termination contracts, recovery, idempotency, budgets, no-progress detection, and replayable agent loops.Open lesson
  5. 5Harness Engineering & SandboxesReproducible execution, containers and microVMs, resource limits, mocks, structured observations, and trace capture.Open lesson
  6. 6AI Evaluation & Quality GatesGolden datasets, RAG and agent metrics, offline and online evaluation, regression tests, and CI release gates.Open lesson
  7. 7Agent Guardrails & SecuritySchema controls, prompt-injection defense, least privilege, circuit breakers, budgets, approvals, and incident response.Open lesson

Decisions this path should help you make

  • Which steps should remain deterministic?
  • What authority does each tool require?
  • How will the runtime detect no progress or an ambiguous write?
  • Which trajectory evidence proves a safe outcome?
Updated August 27, 2026 · Free public lessons · No login required