Building Local Agentic AI with Pi

This one-day hands-on course provides a practical exploration of modern Agentic AI by opening up the underlying machinery that turns an LLM into an acting system.

Participants begin by establishing clearly that an LLM alone is not an agent. Students analyze major framework paradigms in the industry (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, and application-owned loops) to understand what those abstractions hide. They then strip away those abstractions and build a minimal, application-owned agent harness from scratch in vanilla JavaScript, using Pi, a small, real, MIT-licensed agent harness, running entirely locally against Ollama and a small local model, with no cloud API keys and no licensing headaches.

By the end of the day, participants will have built a functioning application-owned AI agent directly against a local LLM endpoint, including tool calling, execution dispatch, observation handling, message history/state, and loop termination, culminating in a capstone diagnostic agent that investigates a broken web application and recovers from a real tool failure on its own.