Agentic AI: Beyond Coding Assistants and Chatbots

A hands-on workshop on building AI agents step by step. We build agents in stages, starting with a plain OpenAI REST API call and ending with multi-agent workflows in Pydantic AI. The models run on the LUMI supercomputer and are served by the Aitta inference service. Our running example is a flight-booking assistant.

We cover:

• LLM basics and inference, including serving models with the Aitta inference server and using prompt templates

• Building agents from scratch, from a single REST call to structured workflows

• Agent components: model, harness, loop, tools, MCP servers, skills and memory

• Security and evaluation, including running agents reliably outside a laptop

Prerequisites

• Prior Python programming experience. No machine learning background is needed.

• Basic use of a terminal and a code editor.

• A LUMI account that is a member of any LUMI project, used to log in to Aitta. Course participants are added to the training project, but any other LUMI project works too.

• For technical requirements follow the setup instructions before the workshop.

Schedule

The workshop runs online over four afternoons in November 2026. Registration and further details are on the course page.

Important

The Zoom link and the instructions for getting your LUMI account have been sent to you by email.

We highly encourage you to join the setup session on Monday. We will go through the setup together and fix any problems, so that the hands-on exercises run for you from the first day.

The times of the episodes are approximate and include the exercises.

Setup session · Monday 2 November

Pre-workshop setup with Aitta and the training environment

🇸🇪 13:00–14:00 (CET) · 🇫🇮 14:00–15:00 (EET)

Time	Episode	Instructors
60 min	0. Setup	…

Day 1 · Tuesday 3 November

LLMs and agents with simple tool calling

🇸🇪 12:30–15:30 (CET) · 🇫🇮 13:30–16:30 (EET)

Time	Episode	Instructors
15 min	Welcome and practicalities
45 min	1. Large Language Models	AM & MT
10 min	☕ Break
60 min	2. Basics of AI agents	MT & MS
10 min	☕ Break
40 min	3. Model Context Protocol	MT & MS

Day 2 · Wednesday 4 November

Agentic workflows with skills, memory and multiple agents

🇸🇪 12:30–15:30 (CET) · 🇫🇮 13:30–16:30 (EET)

Time	Episode	Instructors
45 min	4. Skills	FF & MT
10 min	☕ Break
45 min	5. Memory	AM & MT
10 min	☕ Break
70 min	6. Multiple agents (in preparation)	AM & FF

Day 3 · Thursday 5 November

Evaluation, risks and security

🇸🇪 12:30–15:30 (CET) · 🇫🇮 13:30–16:30 (EET)

Time	Episode	Instructors
50 min	7. Evaluating an agent	FF & AG
10 min	☕ Break
80 min	8. Security (in preparation)	AG & AM
10 min	☕ Break
30 min	9. Outlook (in preparation)	MT & AM

Credits

How do I get 1 ECTS credit or a certificate?

Aalto Scientific Computing has kindly offered to give 1 ECTS credit for this workshop.

• Do all the exercises and report your results in a text, PDF, Markdown or Word file. For each exercise, include:

  • the prompts you gave the agent and its answers;

  • the relevant part of the agent’s log, for example the tool calls and their results. You can copy the log from your terminal or add screenshots;

  • your code, if the exercise asks you to write some, for example the book_flight tool or your own SKILL.md;

  • a few sentences answering the questions in the exercise.

• Send everything to scip@aalto.fi by 30 November 2026. Ideally, you do all the tasks during the course: remember that the LUMI training project, and with it your access, ends on 23 November 2026.

• If you are a doctoral student in Finland, add Aalto University’s SCI-L1010 to your study program (see doctoralcourses.fi).

• If you are not a doctoral student in Finland, you get a certificate to give to your study coordinator or supervisor to register it, similar to a workshop at a conference.

Learning outcomes

This workshop is for IT professionals, software engineers and data scientists, for programmers who want to use AI beyond a chat interface, and for people who use chatbots or coding assistants and want to understand how they work.

By the end of this workshop, learners should be able to:

• Identify the main components of an AI agent and explain concepts such as tool calling and MCP.

• Build agents in stages and connect tools, MCP servers and memory to them.

• Analyze pitfalls when moving agents from development to production.

See also

Credit

This workshop is organized by the LUMI AI Factory Service Center and Sweden AI Factory.

If you are interested in using AI coding assistants responsibly in your research software work, check out the CodeRefinery lesson Responsible Use of Generative AI in Assisted Coding.

License

CC BY-SA for media and pedagogical material

Copyright © 2026, LUMI AI Factory, Sweden AI Factory, Abdul Ghafoor, Ashwin Mohanan, Daniel Medeiros, Francesco Fiusco, Marlon Tobaben, Mitja Sainio, Vijeta Sharma . This material is released by LUMI AI Factory and Sweden AI Factory under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Canonical URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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This deed highlights only some of the key features and terms of the actual license. It is not a license and has no legal value. You should carefully review all of the terms and conditions of the actual license before using the licensed material.

MIT for source code and code snippets

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2026, LUMI AI Factory, Sweden AI Factory, Abdul Ghafoor, Ashwin Mohanan, Daniel Medeiros, Francesco Fiusco, Marlon Tobaben, Mitja Sainio, Vijeta Sharma

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