Staging environment
Free Lesson

Five Mistakes Everyone Makes When Building AI Agents

Hosted by Hugo Bowne-Anderson

240 students

In this video

What you'll learn

Avoid the architecture mistakes that derail agents

Decide when you need a model call, a fixed workflow, or an agent loop, and why copying a coding agent can mislead you.

Catch the harness mistakes that add needless complexity

Spot unnecessary tools and orchestration, and see when model upgrades mean removing scaffolding instead of adding more.

Avoid the eval mistake that hides agent failures

Use real tasks, tool-call traces, and evals to catch failures and test whether changes to your harness actually help.

Why this topic matters

You add memory because coding agents have it, give the model control over steps your code could handle, and keep every workaround when you upgrade the model. Then you change the prompt, tools, and architecture together and wonder what helped. I'll unpack five mistakes in agent architecture, harness engineering, and evaluation, showing how to build less, inspect failures, and verify improvements.

You'll learn from

Hugo Bowne-Anderson

AI & data engineer, consultant, educator of 6+ million students (ex-Yale)

Hugo Bowne-Anderson is an independent data & AI consultant with extensive experience in the tech industry. He has advised and taught teams building AI-powered systems, including engineers from Netflix, Meta, and Amazon. He is the host of Vanishing Gradients, where he explores developments in data science and artificial intelligence, and has written for publications including Harvard Business Review and VentureBeat. Previously, Hugo served as Head of Developer Relations at Outerbounds and held roles at Coiled and DataCamp, where his work in data science education reached over 6 million learners. He has taught at Yale University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and conferences including SciPy and PyCon, and is a passionate advocate for democratizing AI skills and open-source tools.

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Build AI Agents from First Principles
Hugo Bowne-Anderson
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