If you’ve been experimenting with tools like Claude Code or Codex and feel like you’re already feeling overwhelmed, this is the place to start. Instead of tips and tricks, it offers the picture underneath it all: a plain-language mental model for how these systems actually work, built one step at a time.
Notes
This opening tutorial sets the conceptual foundation for the rest of the series. The goal is to help you move from “I can use AI tools” toward “I understand what these systems are doing and I see how to work with them.”
I am trying to fill a gap I see in other tutorials on agentic tools that either assume a software-development background or jump straight to tips and hacks. This one slows down and focuses on the larger underlying pattern instead.
We begin with the idea of an LLM as a predictive engine, then look at how software gets built around that engine to create different kinds of harnesses. From there, the walkthrough traces the shift from the original chatbot, to reasoning-enabled chatbots, to tools and genuinely agentic workflows with live demos of what each looks like in practice.
The point isn’t just to define terms. It’s to leave you confident enough to experiment, troubleshoot, and make sense of these systems.