Phase 2: Skill Development

Once your first agent is working, the next step is to make it smarter, more useful, and integrated with the outside world.

🎯 Step 4: Learn Prompt Engineering

• Master how to give your agents clear, contextual instructions

• Experiment with:

  • Few-shot prompting

  • Role-based instructions

  • System vs. user prompts

• Learn to debug poorly performing prompts by analyzing output errors

Good prompt writing = fewer bugs, cheaper runs, better results

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🧰 Step 5: Add External Tools

• Make your agent actually do things:

  • Search the web

  • Call APIs (e.g., weather, news, internal tools)

  • Perform calculations

• Handle edge cases and errors (API fails, wrong format, etc.)

Agents become valuable when they interact with the real world — not just text.

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💼 Step 6: Build Real Mini-Projects

• Start with something small but practical:

  • Automate your meeting notes

  • Build a personal assistant

  • Summarize articles, PDFs, or emails

• Share it with others for testing and feedback

• Iterate on usefulness, speed, and reliability

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At this stage, you're building autonomous workflows, not just responses.