ai agents / ai development
I'll Teach You How To Build AI Agents From Scratch (10 Billion Tokens Proof)
Course walkthrough
AI Agents from Scratch
All lessons in this series
- 1I'll Teach You How To Build AI Agents From Scratch (10 Billion Tokens Proof)
- 2What Is An AI Agent? (ChatGPT Doesn't Count)
- 3The ONE Trick That Turns ChatGPT Into An AI Agent (Tools)
- 4The ReAct Loop: How Cursor & Claude Code Actually Work
- 5The System Prompt That Changes Everything (Prompt Engineering For AI Agents)
- 6How To Make Your AI Agent Truly Autonomous (Without It Going Rogue)
- 7How To Trigger An AI Agent (5 Different Ways)
- 8Subagents Explained: How AI Agents Launch Other AI Agents
- 9Simple Memory: How AI Agents Remember Between Runs
- 10How AI Agents Actually Remember (Memory + RAG Explained)
- 11How To Actually Tell If Your AI Agent Is Good (Evaluation)
- 12The Complete Guide To Building AI Agents (10 Lesson Recap)
AI agents are how modern AI actually gets things done. They don't just respond to prompts — they reason, call tools, and execute multi-step tasks autonomously. Big tech companies like Cursor, Claude Code, and ChatGPT are all built on the same handful of patterns.
In this course, I'll teach you exactly how they work under the hood.
You'll learn: → What a real AI agent is (and why ChatGPT isn't one) → Tools: function calling, JSON output, and how agents actually do things → The REACT loop: the orchestration pattern behind every modern agent → Autonomy: when to let your agent run free vs. ask for approval → Subagents, memory, RAG, and evaluation — everything production agents need
This isn't a marketing fluff course. It's the exact framework I use to ship production AI agents at scale, including the ones I built at Oscar Health and Coinbase.
Watch lessons, complete hands-on activities, pass quizzes — and by the end, you'll know exactly how to build your own production-ready AI agent from scratch.
Transcript
0:05How to build your own AI agents from scratch Big tech companies like Anthropic OpenAI and Cursor don't want you to know how AI agents work under the hood
0:18so they can sell you subscriptions on their platforms I'm here to tell you that building an AI agent isn't nearly as hard as you think What are my qualifications For one I have a
0:31master's degree in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon literally the best school in the entire world for artificial intelligence Number two I've worked in the industry and have built production AI agents
0:46This includes Asaba an autonomous AI agent for understanding claim adjudication which I built at my time at Oscar Health I've also built several AI projects at my time at Coinbase where I worked on
1:00the institutional onboarding team Finally I've had several interviews for big tech for AI native positions at companies like OpenAI and Meta
1:11Finally I have this plaque from OpenAI that demonstrates my AI expertise It says for Austin Starks honored for passing
1:2210 billion tokens In this tutorial series I'm going to teach you how to build your own AI agents from scratch This course is meant for one of three types of people Number
1:36one is if you work in big tech at all whether that's if you're a product manager a software engineer or even a computer science student aspiring to work in big tech Number two is for those practicing for
1:49AI native or forward deployed engineers I use this exact outline to pass big tech interviews at companies like Meta Number three is built for those who want to learn how to leverage AI
2:04in a stock market for real world use cases including those who want to create algorithmic trading bots or those who just want to learn how to use AI to manage their portfolio This
2:17course will be semi technical There will be some simple code snippets and diagrams though you won't be expected to reproduce them The purpose of the course is to teach you how these
2:31agents actually work under the hood If you find that you're in one of these categories of people then sit back relax take your notebook out because this
2:44is the most important course that you'll take this year
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