Agent Engineering in Java: From LLM Foundations to Production Systems

Most agent courses teach you to make an agent work. This one teaches you to own one in production.

You will build one system through the whole course: the Order Support Assistant, which answers order questions, cancels and refunds within policy, retrieves return rules, and asks a person before it does anything it cannot undo. It is never thrown away. Every module adds a capability and a new way for it to break, and the capstone is the same system, hardened and run under traffic.

Every lesson asks you to make a decision, not just write code: whether a task needs an LLM, a tool, an agent, retrieval or several agents at all, and what the cheaper deterministic alternative would cost. You will list what can fail and how you would know, trace every model call and tool call from the first module, and keep the documents real teams keep: an architecture doc, an ADR log, a failure and threat register, a runbook, an evaluation set, a cost ledger and postmortems.

You build the mechanism before you use the tool that hides it. You call the provider's API directly before LangChain4j, write the agent loop, budgets and retries yourself before Spring Boot packages them, and build checkpoint and resume by hand before Temporal makes execution durable. That way you can judge when a framework helps and when it is overkill.

You are assessed the way engineering teams assess senior engineers: through decision memos, design reviews, incident drills with postmortems, and evaluation-driven changes. Code that runs is the entry ticket, not the grade.

The course has a core path and optional depth lessons, and four credentials along the way: Foundations after Module 2, Reliable Agent after Module 5, Production Agent after Module 12 and Agent Engineer after the capstone.