Home/Catalog/Hardcore Developers
Cutting EdgeHardcore DevelopersShu-Ha-Ri Method

The Agent Playbook

20+ Battle-Tested Design Patterns—Stop Building Agents by Trial and Error

Most agents are built by trial and error. Yours won't be. Master the pattern language that turns agent-building from guesswork into engineering.

AI agents are showing up everywhere—and most of them are duct tape. This masterclass gives you what the field has been missing: a durable engineering vocabulary of 20+ composable, production-tested design patterns for building agents that are reliable, efficient, controllable, and easy to reason about. Every pattern follows a rigorous template—named problem, clear solution, benefits, drawbacks, variants, and composition rules—so patterns click together like well-designed APIs. You'll learn to read an underperforming agent, pinpoint exactly which quality is missing, and reach for the specific pattern that fixes it. You'll lower per-run costs without redesigning, add human-in-the-loop control where it matters, and build self-improving agents that auto-tune their own prompts. Frameworks age in months; design intuition outlasts every model release.

FROM
API Consumer
$100K-$150K · Replaceable Skills
TO
Model Builder
$250K-$400K · Irreplaceable
9 weeks · 50 hours · Own your model weights forever
Why It's a Masterclass, Not a Course

AI Hyper-Personalizes Your Experience

This isn't a one-size-fits-all course. It's assessed to your gaps, adapted to you, and finished with a custom deliverable you build and own.

01Before You Start

Pre-Masterclass Assessment

You begin with an AI-driven assessment that maps what you already know against everything this masterclass covers. We pinpoint your knowledge gaps up front—so your time goes only where it moves the needle.

02During

An AI-Personalized Path

Your results reshape the masterclass around you. The AI aligns the material, examples, and pace to close your specific gaps—so a fixed curriculum becomes a path built for exactly one person: you.

03Your Outcome

A Custom Deliverable You Own

You don't leave with a certificate—you leave with a real, working artifact built for your goals. In "The Agent Playbook," that means a deliverable you can ship, show, and build on. Something you made, not just something you watched.

Proven Transformation Results

Real outcomes from students who completed The LLM Sovereignty Stack™ and built their competitive moats

📈 Career Transformation

75%
Promoted to Senior+ within 12 months
$80K-$150K
Average salary increase
90%
Report being 'irreplaceable' at their company
85%
Lead AI initiatives after completion

💰 Business Impact

$150K/year
Average API cost savings from owning model weights
70%
Eliminate third-party model dependencies entirely
60%
Raise funding citing proprietary technology as moat
3-6 months
Average time to ROI on course investment

What You'll Actually Build

🏗️
Complete GPT
4,000+ lines of PyTorch
🧠
Attention
From scratch, no libraries
📊
Training
100M+ tokens
🎯
Classification
95%+ accuracy
💬
ChatBot
Instruction-following

Choose Your Path to Mastery

All modalities include the complete LLM Sovereignty Stack™. Choose based on your learning style and goals.

Self-Paced Mastery

$1,197
Lifetime Access
Self-directed learners
  • All 7 modules available immediately
  • Lifetime access to content and updates
  • Community support and code reviews
  • Monthly live office hours
Most Popular

7-Week Live Cohort

$4,997
12 Weeks
Engineers wanting accountability
  • Weekly live workshops with Dr. Lee
  • Architecture reviews of your agents
  • Direct instructor access
  • Graduation certificate
  • Alumni network access

Founder's Edition

$12,997
6 Months
Founders & technical leaders
  • One-on-one mentorship with Dr. Lee
  • Architecture review of YOUR agent systems
  • Cost optimization roadmap
  • 90-day satisfaction guarantee

4-Day Immersive Bootcamp

Executive intensive format. Pattern-driven rebuild of a real agent. Live design review sessions.

Course Curriculum

7 transformative steps · 30 hours of hands-on content

1

Module 1: Why Patterns—The End of Trial and Error

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • The State of Agent Building: Everyone Improvising
  • What a Design Pattern Is (and Isn't) for Agents
  • The Pattern Template: Problem, Solution, Tradeoffs, Composition Rules
  • Reading Agent Flow Diagrams Fluently
  • How to Diagnose an Agent Like an Architect
2

Module 2: Composable Agent Patterns

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • The Core Pattern Set: The Building Blocks of Every Agent
  • Composition Rules: Which Patterns Click Together—and Which Clash
  • Worked Examples: Assembling Agents from Named Parts
  • Variants: Adapting Patterns to Your Constraints
  • Hands-On: Rebuild a Duct-Tape Agent with Named Patterns
3

Module 3: Designing Agent Architectures

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • From Patterns to Architecture: Structuring Whole Systems
  • Choosing Control Flow: Loops, Routers, and Pipelines
  • State and Data Flow Across Pattern Boundaries
  • Architecture Reviews: Reasoning About Agents on Paper
  • Hands-On: Design an Architecture Before Writing a Line of Code
4

Module 4: Reliability & Cost Optimization Patterns

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • Where Agent Costs Actually Come From
  • Patterns That Cut Cost per Run Without Redesign
  • Reliability Patterns: Retries, Verification, and Guarded Execution
  • The Reliability-Cost-Latency Triangle
  • Hands-On: Halve an Agent's Cost While Raising Its Success Rate
5

Module 5: Human-in-the-Loop Patterns

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • Autonomy Is a Dial, Not a Switch
  • Approval Gates, Escalation, and Steering Patterns
  • Designing Interfaces Humans Actually Use
  • When to Remove the Human: Graduation Criteria
  • Hands-On: Add Control to an Agent Without Killing Its Value
6

Module 6: Self-Improving Agents

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • Agents That Learn from Their Own Runs
  • Auto-Tuning Prompts from Outcome Data
  • Guardrails for Self-Modification
  • Measuring Improvement Honestly
  • Hands-On: Build an Agent That Optimizes Itself
7

Module 7: Production-Ready Applications

5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle

  • Composing the Full Pattern Stack for Deployment
  • Transparency and Testability as First-Class Requirements
  • Pattern-Level Observability
  • Capstone: Ship a Production Agent Built Entirely from Named Patterns
  • Your Pattern Library Going Forward

Production-Grade Tech Stack

Master the same tools used by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to build frontier AI systems

PythonLLM APIsMCPAgent Frameworks (framework-agnostic)Evaluation Harnesses

Frequently Asked Questions

How is this different from Build Your Own Autonomous AI Agent?

That masterclass teaches you to build the machinery—ReAct loops, tools, memory—from scratch. The Agent Playbook is the senior-engineer sequel: the design vocabulary for architecting, diagnosing, and optimizing agents. Build the machine first, then learn to design with it.

Is this tied to a specific framework?

No—deliberately. Patterns are framework-agnostic by design. Whether you build on raw APIs, your own infrastructure from our other masterclasses, or a commercial framework, the patterns and their composition rules apply unchanged.

I already have agents in production. Is this still useful?

That's exactly who it's for. You'll learn to read an underperforming agent, name the missing quality, and apply the specific corrective pattern—including cost patterns that typically cut per-run spend dramatically without a redesign.

What will I have by the end?

A working pattern library in code, a production agent composed entirely from named patterns, and the architectural vocabulary to design and review agent systems the way senior engineers review distributed systems.

Stop Renting AI. Start Owning It.

Join 500+ engineers and founders who've gone from API consumers to model builders—building their competitive moats one step at a time.

Command $250K-$400K salaries or save $100K-$500K in annual API costs. Own your model weights. Build defensible technology moats. Become irreplaceable.

Starting at
$1,197

Self-paced · Lifetime access · 30-day guarantee

Start Your Transformation

This is not just education. This is technological sovereignty.

30-day guarantee
Lifetime updates
Zero API costs forever