Microsoft 12-Lesson AI Agents Course (Free, GitHub)
What it is
Free 12-lesson curriculum from Microsoft covering the fundamentals of building AI agents, from tool-calling and multi-agent orchestration to retrieval-augmented generation and trust/safety. Each lesson includes code samples, notebooks, and video walkthroughs. Built for developers and advanced no-coders who want to understand what's happening under the hood of tools like Make.com AI Agents and n8n agent nodes.
Why we picked it
The most comprehensive free agent-building curriculum available. Students who complete Modules 1 to 4 and want to go deeper will find this invaluable. Gives them the conceptual foundation to build custom agents beyond drag-and-drop platforms. Microsoft-backed = regularly updated.
How you might use it
Operations work is often invisible until something breaks. This fits the Run Smoother Operations workflow, which is about fixing the processes you run more than once a week. Pick one of those processes and test it there first.
Visit the resource
Go to github.comOpens the official site in a new tab.
More from M5: Operations Automation
IonRouter: High-Throughput, Low-Cost AI Inference Router (YC W26)
YC-backed inference routing platform that automatically selects the cheapest/fastest AI model for each request across pr...
Model Context Protocol (MCP): The Missing Standard for AI Agents
MCP (launched by Anthropic, Nov 2024, now widely adopted in 2026) is an open standard that lets AI agents connect to any...
Composio Agent Orchestrator: Open-Source Multi-Agent Tool Management
Open-sourced in late Feb 2026. Composio's Agent Orchestrator solves a critical problem: when AI agents have too many too...
OpenAI: A Practical Guide to Building AI Agents
A strong operator-level guide to when agents are actually the right choice, how to structure workflows, tool use, handof...
The guided path
Want the guided path? The playbook shows you what to build first, step by step.
Seven workflows. The best tools from this library, arranged into a sequence that gets your first automation running in your first session.
