Three-Project Series
- prerequisites
- Basic Python • Web API usage
- skills learned
- Creating a chatbot that demonstrates specific human-facing characteristics, like empathy and altruism • Persona design • Advanced prompt engineering • LangChain chatbot development • RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) • agent reasoning
pro $24.99 per month
- access to all Manning books, MEAPs, liveVideos, liveProjects, and audiobooks!
- choose one free eBook per month to keep
- exclusive 50% discount on all purchases
- renews monthly, pause or cancel renewal anytime
lite $19.99 per month
- access to all Manning books, including MEAPs!
team
5, 10 or 20 seats+ for your team - learn more
As its public face, a chatbot needs to project the values and character of the organization it represents. In this series of liveProjects, you’ll help out a local pet refuge by building an AI-powered chatbot that shares both the knowledge and the attitudes of that compassionate institution. Starting with prompt engineering and persona design, you’ll progressively layer in curated search, multi-use case handling, and callback scheduling. You’ll take advantage of OpenAI’s API along with LangChain and LangGraph to create a custom assistant that can deliver 24/7 pet care guidance. By the end, you’ll have a sophisticated AI agent that blends empathy, domain-specific knowledge retrieval, and intelligent routing.
These projects are designed for learning purposes and are not complete, production-ready applications or solutions.
here's what's included
Project 1 Designing Persona & Core Skills
In the first liveProject, you’ll create a basic chatbot that can reliably field questions in a way that’s consistent with the mission of the pet refuge. You’ll craft structured, effective prompts and design a persona for your chatbot, implement the basic functionality, and then test, refine, and improve your chatbot with iterative evaluation.
learn more
$29.99
$19.99
Project 2 Add Curated Knowledge Base Search
In this second liveProject, you’ll add Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to a pre-existing chatbot so that it can provide up-to-date and reliable responses to questions fielded by the pet refuge. First, you’ll connect your chatbot to a document store and test it on real pet care questions to ensure answers are grounded in reliable sources. Then, you’ll improve retrieval quality by expanding the knowledge base, refining queries to better capture user intent, and adding smart filters for more relevant, precise results.
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$29.99
$19.99
Project 3 Build a Reasoning & Workflow Agent
In the third liveProject, you’ll upgrade the capabilities of the RAG-enhanced chatbot, turning it into a multi-use-case agent using advanced reasoning, custom tools, and the ReAct framework. First, you’ll build a robust prompt chain with reasoning to classify queries and route them to the right path. Next, you’ll add practical tools and workflows with LangGraph to handle out-of-scope cases, capture user info, and blend retrieval with classification. Finally, unify everything into an agentic system that can choose tools, search knowledge, collect details, escalate when needed, and keep conversations natural.
learn more
$29.99
$19.99
books resources
When you start each of the projects in this series, you'll get full access to the following books for 90 days.
choose your plan
pro
monthly
annual
$24.99
$249.99
only $20.83 per month
- access to all Manning books, MEAPs, liveVideos, liveProjects, and audiobooks!
- choose another free product every time you renew
- choose twelve free products per year
- exclusive 50% discount on all purchases
- renews monthly, pause or cancel renewal anytime
- renews annually, pause or cancel renewal anytime
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From Prompts to an Agentic System project for free
From Prompts to an Agentic System project for free
team
monthly
annual
$49.99
$499.99
only $41.67 per month
- five seats for your team
- access to all Manning books, MEAPs, liveVideos, liveProjects, and audiobooks!
- choose another free product every time you renew
- choose twelve free products per year
- exclusive 50% discount on all purchases
- renews monthly, pause or cancel renewal anytime
- renews annually, pause or cancel renewal anytime
-
![]()
From Prompts to an Agentic System project for free
Prerequisites
This liveProject series is for Python programmers ready to develop basic chatbots into sophisticated AI agents with accurate personas. You should be comfortable with Python scripting and eager to learn advanced prompt engineering, custom tool development, and agent frameworks.
TOOLS
- Intermediate Python
- Basics of Jupyter Notebook
- Basics of text processing
- Basics of file management
- Basics of data structures
- Basics of prompt engineering
- Basics of API Integration
- Basics of Retrieval Augmented Generation
features
- Self-paced
- You choose the schedule and decide how much time to invest as you build your project.
- Project roadmap
- Each project is divided into several achievable steps.
- Get Help
- While within the liveProject platform, get help from fellow participants and even more help with paid sessions with our expert mentors.
- Compare with others
- For each step, compare your deliverable to the solutions by the author and other participants.
- book resources
- Get full access to select books for 90 days. Permanent access to excerpts from Manning products are also included, as well as references to other resources.
