Agents at WorkFree · koha · CC BY 4.0
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Agents at Work

Building an agent — a tool that acts for you, unattended — is within reach of any business owner with a few smarts. You don't need to be a coder. This is a practical course on building one you can answer for: start simple, grow its role as you learn, and keep a hand on the wheel while the ground moves.

Start small, stay in control — not one grand agent. The businesses that use agents well in two years will be the ones with their hands on a simple one today. The discipline underneath every lesson: you answer for what the agent does, so build it so you always can.

Start here → Printable tools →

Third in a trilogy. The Village Small Business Course teaches which work to hand over; Working with Claude teaches trustworthy output; this one teaches building and deploying the agent — and staying accountable for it.

What you'll be able to do

  • Decide which work is fair game for an agent — and the question most guides skip: whose data, and whose call.
  • Design it to be narrow, checkable, and blind where it should be — with a human gate that actually holds.
  • Guard & build one with Claude Code — including the one you build to watch fail, and the test that catches the bias design can't.
  • Deploy & answer — oversee an unattended agent, know the law you're under, and carry your duty to the person on the other side.

Four anchors run through the whole course: continuous learning, continuous improvement, AI goodness at the foundation, and product that serves humanity.

Your progress

· Saved on this device only — no account, no tracking.

Start here

PrimerStart here — the 5-minute primer

Tier 1 · Decide

1.1Assistant, agent, agentic workflow 1.2Meet the agents — the gallery 1.3Which work is fair game 1.4The data question, first

Tier 2 · Design

2.1Scope and least privilege 2.2The human gate — and its hard limit 2.3Criteria, not vibes 2.4Identity-blind — and why it isn't enough

Tier 3 · Guard & build

3.1Guardrails you can write 3.2Testing your agent 3.3Build with Claude Code — two agents 3.4The sovereign option 3.5Which model tier runs your agent

Tier 4 · Deploy & answer

4.1Deploy and oversee — a green tick isn't success 4.2The law you're under 4.3te Tiriti and Māori data 4.4The other side of the table

Capstone

CapstoneYour agent-deployment brief

For the other side

One-pagerWhen an AI reads your CV

Tools you can keep

Four printable one-page cards — the redact checklist, the criteria template, the bias-probe method, and the candidate one-pager — drawn straight from the lessons. Open the tools →

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