teaching_llm_agents
LLM Agents
Course Overview
This course introduces students to LLMs, agents and multi-agent systems.
- practical development of intelligent agents and applications powered by Large Language Models (LLMs).
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Students will explore how LLMs can be orchestrated and integrated with external tools, APIs, and structured memory systems
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enable decision-making, problem-solving, and autonomous interaction across complex software engineering tasks.
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A variety of application areas will be considered, for example including the use of LLM-based technologies to develop assistive systems. Application areas will include medical diagnosis, or to streamline resource allocation, hazard analysis and decision-making.
- Core agent architectures, and retrieval-augmented agents will be examined through applied coding labs and project-based learning
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students will gain hands-on experience with agentic frameworks and prompt-augmentation techniques to build agents for a variety of purposes: searching the web, querying databases, controlling devices, composing workflows etc.
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Emphasis will be placed on the integration of LLMs in software engineering processes and practices, and on how to document this usage.
- Taking a systems-centric view, students will learn the importance of understanding and bounding the behaviour of LLM-based agents in the wider system context
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how to evaluate and monitor agents’ behaviours, and how to use guardrails to frame their autonomy where necessary.
- Ethical and safety considerations, including agent alignment, hallucination control, and failure recovery, will also be addressed to ensure responsible deployment in real-world contexts.
Resources
Level: Undergraduate
Prerequisites: Basic programming knowledge (any language)
Duration: 12 weeks (3 hours/week lecture + 2 hours/week lab)
Course Instructor: Soumya Banerjee
Course Website: https://neelsoumya.github.io/teaching_llm_agents/
Course Materials
Course content and materials can be found in the following files:
- Resources
- Installation guide
- Skills
- Tools
- Agents
- MCP
- Computer use
- Guardrails
- Evals
- Open source models and Ollama
- Projects, exams and quizzes
Learning Objectives
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
- Create multi-agent systems
Course Structure
Module 1: Web Fundamentals (Weeks 1-2)
- How the web works (HTTP, DNS, Client-Server architecture)
- HTML5 structure and semantics
- Forms and input validation
- Introduction to development tools
Module 2: Styling with CSS (Weeks 3-4)
- CSS selectors and specificity
- Box model and layout techniques
- Flexbox and Grid
- Responsive design and media queries
Module 3: Introduction to PHP (Weeks 5-6)
- PHP syntax and data types
- Control structures and functions
- Working with forms and user input
- Sessions and cookies
Module 4: Database Integration (Weeks 7-8)
- MySQL fundamentals
- PHP and MySQL integration
- Prepared statements and security
- Building a CRUD application
Module 5: Advanced Topics (Weeks 9-10)
- Authentication and authorization
- File uploads and handling
- Error handling and debugging
- Introduction to MVC pattern
Module 6: Project & Deployment (Weeks 11-12)
- Final project development
- Security best practices
- Web hosting and deployment
- Performance optimization
Required Materials
- Setup instructions
- Installation guide
- Text Editor (VS Code recommended)
- XAMPP or MAMP (local development environment)
- Modern web browser (Chrome/Firefox with DevTools)
- Git for version control
Recommended Resources
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Dr. Chuck’s PHP Course: A comprehensive course on PHP programming available on YouTube.
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Dr. Chuck’s Web Development Course on YouTube: A playlist of free video lectures covering web programming concepts.
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W3Schools: A comprehensive resource for learning web technologies including HTML, CSS, and PHP.
Acknowledgements
Generative AI was used to generate content for this course. All content was vetted and verified by the author.
Support
- Office Hours: [TBD]
- Discussion Forum: [TBD]
- Teaching Assistants: [TBD]