Welcome

This course begins with a test that has already finished. An online shop has had an AI agent handling complaints for two weeks, and every morning its report said everything had gone well. You are asked to decide whether it stays and on what terms. In four blocks you will open the file: what the agent was allowed to do, how it worked a twelve-step complaint, what it actually did one night with ten complaints, and what one of the messages contained. By the end you will have written and signed the agent's data sheet. Keep your AI assistant at hand: here you practise with it, and you check it.

What you will find

• Block 1. What an agent can do: tools and permissions. From answering to acting: what a tool is, who actually runs it and where the limits are set, and when you need an agent that chooses the steps and when a fixed flow is enough. First reading of the case: what the complaints agent was allowed to touch.
• Block 2. Briefing an agent: plan, memory and long tasks. How a many-step job is assigned: the plan approved before the action, the notes that act as memory and what changes when several agents work. Second reading of the case: a complaint that needs twelve steps.
• Block 3. Reading what it has done: the trace and the report. The report an agent hands in is its version; the trace is what it did. How to read a long trace without reading all of it, how much to review and where to put the checkpoints. Third reading of the case: ten complaints handled and an action the report does not mention.
• Block 4. Autonomy and security: how much rope and against what. Autonomy is given per task and earned with a track record. And an agent that reads other people's content can receive orders from someone it should not. Final reading of the case: a customer's message that carried a hidden instruction.

How you will work

Each lesson opens with a short introduction and, below it, several pills: short pieces that explain a single idea and end with a case or something to do. Read them in order the first time; afterwards you can go back to the one you need.

Where you see an interactive practice, do it before reading on: it is there for you to decide, calculate or classify, and the explanation comes afterwards. It does not save what you write, so copy whatever you want to keep.

Each block ends with an exam of six questions. All the answers come with a comment, including the wrong ones: failing and reading why is part of the method.

At The Singular Academy you learn by solving real cases. If at the end of a lesson you do not know what you would do differently tomorrow, go back over it.