AI Agent Lab

A hundred and fourteen pages on AI agents, and every one of them runs. A real small language model works on your own GPU, real tools really execute, and every thought, tool call and mistake is printed on screen. Seventeen pages teach the mechanics, 73 walk through specific jobs agents do at work, and 23 cover the patterns behind them. No API key, no signup, nothing uploaded, and every page still works if you never load a model at all.

A five word definition

An agent is a model, tools, and a loop. It gets a goal instead of a message, it can call real functions to find things out or get things done, and it keeps going until the goal is met or a limit stops it. Everything else in this track is detail on those three words.

1

See one run

Start with What is an agent and Tool calling. Ninety percent of the idea is in those two pages.

2

Make it coordinate

Then Memory, Planning, Orchestrator agents, and Routing. This is where systems get real.

3

Make it safe to ship

Testing, Guardrails, Observability, and Monitoring. Skip these and your agent has a demo, not a job.

4

Apply it

Pick a use case from the automation catalog, then build your own and export the config.

Start here: the seventeen core pages

🧭

What is an agent?

The six parts of every agent, then the same question answered by a plain model and by an agent side by side.

Start here. 6 minutes. →
🔧

Tool calling

Run the seven tools yourself, then watch a model choose one, pass arguments, and recover from a bad call.

The single most important mechanic. →
🧠

Memory

Scratchpad, conversation, long term, retrieval. Toggle memory off mid-conversation and watch the agent lose you.

Explains most agent bugs. →
📋

Planning

ReAct or plan first? Give it a goal, get a numbered task list, then watch each task run with real tools.

For goals too big for one step. →
👥

Multiple agents

The five patterns worth knowing, plus a live Drafter to Critic to Editor pipeline on your own text.

When one agent is not enough. →
🚄

Routing and handoffs

A support ticket router that classifies, hands off to a specialist, and escalates to a human below a threshold you set.

The shape most working systems take. →
🎼

Orchestrator agents

Give it a goal with three parts. It splits the goal, hands each task to the worker whose tools fit, runs them together, and merges the answers.

The shape of every agent team. →
🧪

Testing agents

Eight real cases with assertions on the trace. Run them twice with a model loaded and watch the flake appear.

The part everyone skips. →
🧰

Testing frameworks

Build a test by ticking boxes, run it against a live agent, then read the same test as pytest, promptfoo, DeepEval and vitest.

Choose a framework in ten minutes. →
🔭

Observability

Traces, logs and metrics. Run one agent and watch it emit all three, then untick a signal and see which questions you can no longer answer.

The three signals, in one run. →
🌊

Tracing

Read three recorded span waterfalls, click any span for its attributes, record a real one, and watch flat-rate sampling drop the runs you needed.

Find the widest bar. →
📜

Logging

Build the log event field by field, run a real redaction pass on your own text, and price what full payload logging would cost at your traffic.

The evidence, and the bill. →
📏

Metrics

Build a metric set and score it for coverage, watch the average hide the tail, turn a metric into an error budget, and see one label explode your cardinality.

Six numbers, chosen on purpose. →
📈

Monitoring agents

A live production dashboard you can break on purpose. Cause a tool outage or a prompt regression and watch which alert fires first.

What happens after it ships. →
🛡

Guardrails

A poisoned document tries to hijack the agent. Run it with the guardrails off, then on, and see what actually stops it.

Read before anything goes live. →
💼

What agents can automate

The quick view: 57 automations in one filterable table with tools, autonomy and risk. Each has a full page in the jobs catalog.

Find your first use case. →
🛠

Build your own

Name it, instruct it, choose its tools, set a step budget, run it, and export the configuration as JSON.

Put it all together. →

The six things an agent can actually do

Find out

Search, retrieve, read a document, query a database. Most useful agents are mainly this.

Compute

Arithmetic, dates, conversions, aggregation. Never leave these to the model itself.

Decide

Classify, route, prioritize, choose the next step. Cheap, and it is where agents pay off first.

Create

Draft, rewrite, summarize, translate, restructure. The part everyone thinks of, and the least dangerous.

Act

Write to a system: file a ticket, update a record, send a message. Everything risky lives here.

Check

Verify a claim against a source, run assertions, flag what does not hold. The step that makes the rest trustworthy.

What you need

To read and use every pageAny browser. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.
To see real model outputChrome or Edge 113+ on desktop or Android, or Safari 18+, so WebGPU is available. The model downloads once (0.4 GB to 1 GB) and is then cached.
To keep your data privateNothing you type on these pages is sent anywhere. The model runs on your machine, and the tools are JavaScript running in your tab.
CostZero. No API key exists on this site, which is also why the model is small and sometimes wrong. That turns out to be useful: you can watch it fail and see why the checks matter.
Want the written course as well? This lab is the hands-on half. The AI Agents track covers the same ground in depth across 50 topics, and Agent Frameworks in Practice walks through the libraries you would use at work. If you only have ten minutes, stay here and run something.

Free from AI School - no signup, everything runs in your browser.