Back to Learning

Builders, APIs & BasinKit

From APIs and MCP to private agents, observability, and BasinKit. Build the technical layer behind production systems, not just demos.

Audience:Developers, platform builders Modules:10 Duration:~40 hours Difficulty:Advanced
01

LLM Fundamentals

How transformers work, tokenization, context windows, temperature, and sampling. The foundational understanding every AI engineer needs before touching an API.

3 hrs
02

API Mastery

Claude API deep dive -- authentication, messages API, tool use, streaming, structured outputs, and error handling. Build reliable integrations that handle real-world edge cases.

4 hrs
03

Prompt Engineering for Developers

Beyond basic prompting. System prompts, few-shot patterns, chain-of-thought, constitutional AI, output parsing, and the prompt engineering patterns that make production systems reliable.

4 hrs
04

Building Your First AI Agent

The agent loop: observe, reason, act, iterate. Build a working agent from scratch with tool calling, state management, error recovery, and human-in-the-loop control.

5 hrs
05

MCP Deep Dive

Model Context Protocol -- the standard for connecting AI to tools and data. Build MCP servers, integrate MCP clients, and understand the protocol that's replacing custom tool integrations.

4 hrs
06

Multi-Agent Systems

Agent-to-agent communication, delegation protocols, task decomposition, consensus mechanisms, and the coordination patterns we use to run hundreds of agents in production.

4 hrs
07

RAG Architecture

Retrieval-Augmented Generation done right. Embedding strategies, vector databases, chunking, reranking, hybrid search, and the common failure modes that make RAG systems unreliable.

4 hrs
08

Claude Code & Vibe Coding

Ship with AI as your co-developer. Claude Code workflows, CLAUDE.md conventions, agentic coding patterns, and how to build at 30x velocity without sacrificing code quality.

4 hrs
09

Production Deployment

From working prototype to production system. Monitoring, observability, cost management, rate limiting, caching, safety guardrails, and the operational concerns that separate demos from real products.

4 hrs
10

Capstone: Build a Production Agent

Put it all together. Design, build, and deploy a production-grade AI agent that uses tools, manages state, handles failures gracefully, and solves a real problem.

4 hrs

Builders should leave with code, artifacts, and a reviewable capstone.

This path now has a real completion model: code sample, mini-project, quiz checkpoint, and a final artifact bundle. The goal is not to “understand AI.” The goal is to ship something inspectable.

Code samples

Working implementation patterns

Each technical block should resolve into something a builder can read and adapt quickly.

  • tool-calling operator skeleton
  • MCP server starter pattern
  • retrieval pipeline example
Mini projects

Projects that force a real operating shape

The middle of the path should stop being theory and start behaving like a small build sprint.

  • approval-aware intake agent
  • research handoff workflow
  • multi-agent delegation exercise
Capstone output

A reviewable deployment packet

Completion should produce a package that another builder can inspect, run, and critique.

  • architecture diagram
  • repo link + run instructions
  • failure modes and guardrails
Checkpoint

Quiz and review prompts

Builders should be able to explain their choices before they ship the capstone.

  • why agent vs workflow here?
  • where is the human approval boundary?
  • what fails first under real load?

Use the platform and research tracks while the GitHub artifact layer comes online.

The learning architecture is now set: code samples, quiz checkpoints, mini-projects, and capstones. The next live buildout is the shared learning-artifacts repo, starting with builder-grade examples that map directly to this path and resolve into real runnable outputs.

See the Platform Read the Foundations Post Read Platform Research Explore Impact Projects Read the Flagship Guide