Stanford Launches CS329Z, a Full Course on Engineering AI Agents

jyangballin · x · 2026-09-05

Stanford is offering a new Fall 2026 course, CS329Z: Engineering AI Agents, taught by Diyi Yang, Michael Ryan, and John Yang, covering the shift from monolithic LLMs to compound AI systems and autonomous agents.

The curriculum spans RAG, tool use, MCP, and agent loops (built from scratch before introducing frameworks like DSPy), plus memory, multi-agent systems, optimization, agent data, evaluation, coding agents, and the safety and reliability of long-running agents.

Two applied assignments and a quarter-long project give hands-on experience: students first build a research-paper QA agent, then design an evaluation suite with benchmark tasks, code-based graders, and LLM-as-judge.

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