OA-100 · Foundations
Zero to Agents
From "what is this thing?" to your first working agent
The free foundations course — arcs 1–2 of the Zero-to-100 road. Arc 1 (Talk) teaches what a chatbot actually is, what it's great at, how to write the order ticket, and where it hits the wall. Arc 2 (Work) opens the four doors — tools, memory, knowledge, checking — and puts a real agent to work: the hiring test, the trace read in slow motion, the work order with boundaries, and the home-cuisine taste test. You leave running your first agent and judging its plates.
What ships, lesson by lesson.
Someone who read everything — and learned to finish sentences. A mountain of text, a machine that learned one game (guess the next word), and a chat window on top. Explain it at dinner without the word “algorithm.”
The best first draft in the world, of anything made of words. A menu consultant, not a cook — stop asking for answers, start asking for drafts. Answers you have to trust; drafts you get to judge.
No magic words — just the order ticket: what you want, who it’s for, what matters, what done looks like. And you get to send it back; a second draft costs one sentence.
The honest chapter. It can’t do anything, it forgets you, it doesn’t know your stuff, and it sometimes makes things up — confidently. Four walls, and every wall has a door.
Every door from Chapter 4 opens: a stove (tools), an order pad (memory), your pantry (knowledge), a tasting spoon (checking). An agent is a chatbot with a kitchen and a work ethic.
Plan → cook → taste → adjust → plate. The trace is receipts for every step — you don’t watch it work, but you can always check how, not just what.
The ticket comes back — and now it costs groceries. A vague ask gets the wrong dish cooked beautifully, so an agent’s ticket earns one new line: boundaries.
Order from your home cuisine — commission work on a topic you know cold, find the one thing wrong (there’s always one), and send it back with one precise note.