6 Months of Building AI Agents As a Non-Programmer (without the hype)

Everyone is talking about AI agents right now and we are living in such a cool time because with zero coding background you can get in there and leverage these tools and build some really cool AI systems if you guys don't know me my name is Nate I have zero programming background and around 6 months ago I started experimenting with implementing AI into automations and today I'm running an AI automation Agency where we help clients scale their business without increasing headcount and we do this all using no code tools like nadn I also run a community

that's focused on helping others learn how to build these AI agents again with zero coding background so if this kind of stuff sounds interesting to you make sure to watch this video all the way to the end and definitely check out my community the link for that will be down in the description but anyways let's get Right into this one because everyone's talking about this kind of stuff there's a lot of hype and there's a lot of noise to cut through so the first thing I want to do is talk about the hard truths about

AI agents and then I'll get into the seven lessons that I've learned over the past six months building these things so the first one is that most AI agent demos online are just that they're demos so the kind of stuff that you're going to see on LinkedIn blog posts YouTube admittedly my own videos as well these are not going to be production ready builds or production ready templates that you could immediately start to plug into your own business or try to sell to other businesses you'll see all sorts of cool use cases like web researchers

salespeople travel agents just for some context these are screenshots of some of the videos I've made on YouTube this one is like a content creator this one is a human Loop Calendar agent we've got a technical analyst we have a personal assistant with all its agents over here stuff like that but the reality is that all of these pretty much are just going to be you know proof of Concepts they're meant to open open everyone's eyes to what this kind of stuff looks like visually how you can spin this kind of stuff up the fundamentals

that go into building these workflows and at least me personally my biggest motivation in Making these videos is to show you guys how you can actually start to build some really cool stuff with zero programming background and so why do I give all those templates away for free it's because I want you guys to download them hit run see the data flow through and understand what's going on within each node rather than being able to sell that or use it directly in your business because everyone has different Integrations everyone's going to have Different system prompted

and different little tweaks that they need for an automation to be actually high value for them besides that a lot of this is meant to be within a testing environment but if you push it into production and you expose it to all the different edge cases and a tons of different users things are going to come through differently and the automation is going to break and what you need to think about is even these massive companies in The space like apple Google Amazon they're also having issues with AI reliability like what we saw with apple

intelligence having to be delayed so if a company like this with a massive amount of resources is struggling with some of these production ready deployments then it's kind of unrealistic to think that a beginner or non-programmer in these tools can spin up something in a few days that would be fully production ready and by that I Just mean like the stuff you see online you could easily get into NN build something test it and get it really robust in order to sell it that's not what I'm saying at all just kind of the stuff you

see online isn't there yet now the second thing is being able to understand the difference between AI agents and Ai workflows and it's one of those buzzword that everyone's kind of calling everything an agent when in reality that's not the truth so a lot of Times people are calling things AI agents even if they're just sort of like an AI powered workflow now what's an AI powered workflow well as you can see right down here this is one that I had built out and this is an AI powered workflow because it's very sequential as you

can see the data moves from here to here to here to here to here to here and it goes down that process every time even though there are some elements in here using AI like this basic chain and This email writing agent now this has a fixed amount of steps and it flows in this path every single time whereas something over here like an AI agent it has different tools that it's able to call and based on the input we're not sure if it's going to call each one once or it's going to call this

one four times or if it's going to call this one and then this one so that's more of a non-deterministic workflow and that's when you need to use something like an AI agent the difference here is that it's choosing its own steps the process is not predefined meaning every time we throw an input we're not sure what's going to happen and what we're going to get back and then the agent also Loops calls its tools it observes what happens and then it Rel loops and thinks about it again until it realizes okay based on the

input I've done my job now I'm going to spit something out and so here's just a different visualization of you know an AI agent with an input the agent has decision and then there's an output or this AI workflow where we have an input tool one llm call tool two tool three output where it's going to happen in that process every single time and the truth is that most problems don't require true AI agents they can simply be solved with building a workflow that is enhanced with AI and a common mistake and I think it's

just because of all the hype around AI agents is that people are Opting straight away to set up an agent like in this example right here let's say the input is a form trigger where we're getting a form response we're using this tool to clean up the data we're using this llm call so it's an AI enhanced workflow to actually write a personalized email we're using this to update the CRM and then we're using this to send the email and then we get the output back as the human we can also set this up as

a AI agent where we're Getting the form response we're sending this agent the information and it can choose okay first I'm going to clean the data and then I'm going to come back here and think about it and then I'm going to update the CRM and then I'm going to create an email and then I'm going to send the email and then I'm going to output and respond to the human and tell it that you know we we did that job for you but because this process is pretty linear it's going to be a lot

More consistent if we do a workflow it's going to be easier to debug whereas over here the agent May mess up some tool calls and do things in the wrong order so it's better to just structure it out like that and so if we start approaching using these no code tools to build AI workflows first then we can start to scale up to agents once we need more Dynamic decision making and Tool calling okay but that's enough of the harsh truths let's get into the seven most Important lessons I've learned over the 6 months of

building AI agents as a non-programmer so the first one is to build workflows first and notice I don't even say AI workflows here I say workflows so over the past six months of building out these systems and hopping on Discovery calls with clients where I'm trying to help them Implement AI into their business processes we always start by you know having them explain to me some of their pain points and we talk Through processes that are repetitive and and processes that are a big time suck and a lot of times they'll come in you know

thinking they need an AI agent or two and when we really start to break down this process I realized this doesn't need to be an agent this could be an AI workflow and then we break down the process even more and I'm like we don't even need AI here we just need rule-based Automation and we're going to send data from A to B and just do some Manipulation in the middle so let's look at this flowchart for example here we have a form submission we're going to store data we're going to Route it based on

if it's sales support or general we'll have that ticket or notification send an automated acknowledgement and then we'll end the process so this could be a case where we don't even need AI if we're having the forms come through and there's already predefined these three types which are either sales support or General that's a really easy rules-based automation meaning does inquiry type equal sales if yes we'll go this way and so on and so forth now maybe there's AI we need over here to actually send that auto acknowledgement or it could be a simple as

an automated message that we're able to Define based on the inquiry type now if this the form submission is just a a block of text and we need an AI to read it understand it and decide if it's sales support or General then we would need AI right here and that's where we would have to assess what the data looks like coming in and then what we need to do with the data so it's always important to think about do we even need AI here because a lot of times when we're trying to cut off

some of that low hanging fruit when we realize that we're doing some of this stuff too manually we don't even need AI yet we're just going to create a few workflow automations and then we can Start getting more advanced with adding AI in certain steps so hopefully this graphic adds a little more color here on the left we're looking at a rule based sort of filter and on the right we're looking at an AI powered filter so let's take a look at the left one first we have incoming data so let's just say we're routing

data off based on if someone's budget is greater than 10 or less than 10 hopefully it's greater than 10 um so the filter here is is X greater Than 10 if yes we'll send it up towards tool one if no we're going to send it down towards tool two and those are the only two options because those are the only two buckets that a number can fit into unless I guess it's exactly equal to 10 I probably should have made this sign a greater than or equal to but anyways you guys get the point now

over here if we're looking at an AI powered sort of filter right here we're using a large language model to evaluate the Incoming data answer some sort of question and then route it off based on criteria so incoming data we have to look at or sorry not we the AI is looking at what type of email this is because this uses some element of reasoning or logic or decision making something that actually needs to be able to read the context and understand the meaning of what's coming through in order to make that decision this is

where before AI we would have to have a Human in the loop we would have to have a human look at this data and analyze which way it's going to go rather than being able to write some sort of code or filter to do so because it's more than just like what words exist it's actually like how when these words come together in sentences and paragraphs what does it mean so AI is able to read that and understand it and now it can decide if it's a complaint if it's billing or if it's promotion and

then based on what Type it is we'll send it off to a different tool to take the next action so the big takeaway here is to find the simplest approach first you may not even need an agent at all so why would you add more complexity if you don't have to and also if you start to learn the fundamentals of workflow automation data flow logic creative problem solving all that kind of stuff it's going to make it so much easier when you decide to scale up and start building out these multi- Agentic systems as far

as you know sending data between workflows and understanding Landing routing your life's going to be a lot easier so only use AI where it actually is going to provide value and also using Ai and hitting an llm isn't free typically I mean if you're self-hosting but anyways it's not free so why would you want to spend that extra money in your workflow if you don't have to you can scale up when you need the system to decide the Steps on its own when you need it to handle more complex multi-step reasoning and when you needed

to control usage dynamically and I highlighted those three words because that's very like human sounding right decide reason Dynamic okay moving on to lesson number two this is to wireframe before you actually get in there and start building one of the biggest mistakes that I made early on and that I see a ton of people making early on is jumping straight into Their Builder whatever it is and trying to get the idea in their head onto a canvas without mapping it out at all and this causes a lot of problems so the three main ones

here are you you start to create these messy over complicated workflows because you haven't thought out the whole process yet you're going to get confused over where you actually need AI where you don't and you may end up spending hours and hours debugging trying to revise um all this kind of Stuff because you didn't consider either a certain integration upfront or a certain functionality up front or you didn't realize that this could be broken down into different workflows and it would make the whole thing more efficient I can't tell you how many times when I

started off building these kind of things that I got almost near the end and I realized I could have done this with like 20 less nodes or I could have done this in two workflows and made It a lot simpler so I end up just deleting everything and restarting so what we're looking at right here are different Escala draw wireframes that I had done as you can see I kind of do them differently each time there's not really a you know defined way that you need to do this correctly or correct color coding or shapes

the idea here is just to get your thoughts from your head onto a paper or onto a screen and map it out before you get into your workflow Builder because then in the process of mapping things out you're going to understand okay there may be some complexities here or I need all of this functionality here that I didn't think of before and this isn't really to say that there's one correct way too wireframe as you can see sometimes I do it differently um there's not like a designated schema or color type or shape type that

you should be using whatever makes sense to you really but the idea Here is even if you don't want to wireframe and Visually map stuff out it's just about planning before you actually start building so how can you break this whole project you know a lot of people ask me I have an input and I know what that looks like and I know what I want to get over here but in between I have no idea what that looks like so how can we break this whole project into workflows and each workflow is going to

have like Individual tasks within that workflow so breaking it down to as many small tasks as possible makes it a lot more easy to handle makes it a lot less overwhelming than looking at the entire thing at once and thinking how do I get from A to Z and so what that looks like to either wireframe or to just write down the steps is you want to think about what triggers this workflow how does this process start and what does the data look like coming in that triggers it From there how does the data move

where does it go am I able to send it down One path do I have to send it off different ways based on some conditional logic do I need some aspect of AI to take decisions based on the different types of data coming through you know what actions have to be taken where do we need rag or API calls involved where do we need to go out somewhere to get more external data to enrich the context going through to the next llm what Integrations are involved so if you ask yourself these kind of questions while

you're writing down the steps or while you're wireframing out the skeleton of the build you are going to answer so many more question questions especially if it comes to you know you're trying to work with a client and you're trying to understand the scope of work and understand what the solution is going to look like if you wireframe it out you're going to have questions for them that They might have not have thought of either rather than you guys agree on a scope of work and you start building this thing out and then all of

a sudden there's all these complexities maybe you priced way too low maybe you don't know the functionality and the idea here is just to completely align on what you're trying to build and what the client wants or what you're trying to build and what you're actually going to do in your canvas so there's multiple use cases but The idea here is that it's just going to be so so helpful and because you're able to break down every single step and every task involved you'll have a super clear idea on if it's going to be an

agent or if it's going to be a workflow because you'll see if the stuff happens in the same order or if there's an aspect of decision- making involved so when I'm approaching a client build or an internal automation that I'm trying to build for myself there is no way that More than half of my time is spent in the Builder pretty much upfront I'm doing all of the wire Framing and understanding what this is going to look like because the goal here is that we're basically creating a step-by-step instruction manual of how to put the

pieces together you should think of it as if you're putting together a Lego set so you would never grab all the pieces from your bag of Legos rip it open and just start putting them together and Trying to figure out where what goes where you're always going to have right next to you that manual where you're looking at like basically the step-by-step instructions and flipping through so that's what I do with my two monitors on the left I have my wireframe on the right I have my nadn and I'm just looking back and forth and

connecting the pieces where I know the Integrations are supposed to be you need a clear plan otherwise you're not going to know how Everything fits together it's like you were trying to you know build a 500 piece puzzle but you're not allowed to look at the actual picture of a completed puzzle and you're kind of blindly trying to put them together you can do it it can work but it's going to take a lot longer moving on to number three we have context is everything the AI is only going to be as good as the

information that you provide it it is really cool the tech has come so far These AI models are super super intelligent but they're pre-trained so they can't just figure things out especially if they're operating within a specific domain where there's you know industry jargon or your specific business processes it needs your subject matter expertise in order to actually be effective it doesn't think like we do it doesn't have past experiences or intuition at least right away we can give it stuff like that it only works With the data it's given so garbage in equals garbage

out so what happens if you don't provide high quality context hallucination the a is going to start to make up stuff tool misuse it's not going to use the tools correctly and it's going to fail to achieve your tasks that you need it to do and then vague responses if it doesn't have clear Direction and a clear sight of like what is the goal what am I trying to do here it is just not going to be useful it's Going to be generic and it's going to sound very obviously like it came from a chat

gbt so a perfect example here is the salesperson analogy let's say you hire a superstar salesman who is amazing great sales technique he understands how to build rapport closing techniques communication skills just like maybe you're taking a GPT 40 model out of the box and you're plugging it into your agent now no matter how good that model is or the salesperson is there are going To be no closed sales without the subject matter expertise the business process knowledge you know understanding the pricing the features the examples all that kind of stuff so the question becomes

how do you actually provide your AI agents with better context and there are three main ways here the first one is within your agent you have a system prompt so this is kind of like the fine-tuning of the model where we're training it on this is your role this is How you should behave this is what you're supposed to do then we have the sort of memory of of the agent which is more of the short-term memory we're referring to right here where it can understand like the past 10 interactions it had with the user

based on the input stuff like that and then the final aspect which is very very powerful is the rag aspect where it's able to go retrieve information that it doesn't currently have but it's able to Understand what do I need to go get and where can I go get it so it can either hit different apis to get real-time data or it can hit its knowledge base that hopefully is syncing dynamically and is updated so either way it's reaching outside of its system to get more information from these external sources so anyways pre-loaded knowledge this

is basically where you tell the agent its job its description its role as if on day one of a summer internship you told The intern okay this is what you're going to do all summer you define its job responsibilities you would give key facts about your business and you would give it rules and guidelines to follow and then we move on to the user specific context which is just sort of its memory based on the person it's interacting with so this reminds the AI what the customer's already asked previous troubleshooting steps that have been taken

maybe information about the Customer and without this user context specific memory the AI is going to ask the same questions over and over it's going to forget what's already been conversated about and it'll probably just annoy the end user with repetitive information and not very tailored information so we're able to store these past interactions so that the AI can see it before it responds and before it takes action so that it's actually more seamless like a human conversation it's More natural and efficient and then we have the aspect of the real real time context this

is because there's some information that's just too dynamically changing or too large to fit within the actual system prompt of the agent so instead of relying on this predefined knowledge we can retrieve this context dynamically so maybe it's as simple as we're asking the agent what the weather is so it hits that weather API in order to go access real-time current Information about the weather it pulls it back and then it responds to us or it could be you know we're asking about product information within a database so I could go hit that knowledge base

what that has all of our product information and it will search through it look for what it needs and then pull it back and then respond to us with it so that's the aspect of rag and it's super super powerful okay and this is a great segue from rag now we're talking about Vector Databases and when not to use a vector database so I think something similar happened here with Vector databases as the same way it happened with AI agents is that it was just some cool magic buzzword and it sounded like almost too good

to be true so everyone just started overusing them and overusing the term and that's definitely something that I have to admit that I fell victim to because when I first started building this stuff I was taking all types of Data no matter what it was and I was just chucking it into a vector database and chatting with it and because you know 70% of the time I was getting the right answers I was like this is so cool because it's that you know as you can see based on this illustration it is sort of like

that multi-dimensional data representation it's a multi-dimensional space where the data points that you were storing are stored as these little vectors these Little dots everywhere and they're not just placed in there they're placed in there intelligently Because the actual context of the chunk that you're putting into the vector database it's placed based on its meaning so it's embedded based on all these numerical representations of data as you can see like right up here this is what the sort of um embedding Dimensions look like and each point has meaning and so it's placed somewhere where other

things are Placed that are similar they're placed near them so over here we have like you know animals cat dog wolf those are placed similarly we have like fruits over here but also like Tech stuff because Google's here and app which isn't the fruit but it's also the tech brand so you know it also kind of shifts as as you embed more vectors in there so it's just like multi- changing it's very intelligent and the agent's able to scan everything and grab back all the chunks That are relevant really quickly and like I said it's

just kind of one of those buzzwords that super cool however even though it sounds cool after building these systems for a while I learned that Vector databases are not always necessary for most business automation needs if your data is structured and it needs exact retrieval which a lot of times company data is very structured and you do need exact retrieval a relational database is going To be much better for that use case and you know just because it's a buzzword that's exactly what it is a buzzword so that doesn't always mean it's the best tool

for the job so because in college I studied business analytics I've had a little bit of a background with like databases relational databases and analytics um but if you don't really understand the difference between structured and unstructured data and what a relational database is we'll go Over it real quick structure data is basically anything that can fit into rows and columns because it has an organized sort of predictable schema so in this example we're looking at customer data and we have two different tables and this is relational data because over here we have a customer

ID column so customer ID 101 is Alice and we have Alice's email right here customer ID 102 is Bob we have Bob's email and then we have a different table That is able to relate back to this customer lookup table because we match on The Field's customer ID anyway this is an order table it looks like so we have order one by customer ID 101 and the product was a laptop and we may think okay well we're looking at order one who was that we can relate it back to this table based on the customer

ID and then we can look up who that user was so there's a lot of use cases out there when I said you know a lot of Business data is going to be structured like user profiles sales records you know invoice details all this kind of stuff you know even if it's not a relational aspect of linking two tables together if it's structured data which is going to be you know a lot of chart stuff number Stuff um Excel sheets Google Sheets all that kind of stuff right and if it's structured data it's going to

be a lot more efficient to query it using SQL rather than trying to Vectorize it and put it into a vector database for semantic search so we said as a non-programmer if you're you know I'm sure you've been hearing SQL querying and maybe you don't understand exactly what it is this is what it is right so we're almost kind of using natural language to extract information but we could have you know half a million records in a table and so it's just a quicker way to actually filter through that stuff to get what we Need

so in this case let's say the SQL query we're doing is based on the user question of can you check the status of my order for wireless mouse placed on January 10th on the left we have an orders table and this is the information we need these are the fields but there may be 500,000 records so we have to filter through it really quickly and how we would do this is we would say Okay first we're going to do a select statement which just means okay we just Want to see order ID order date order

status because those are the only columns we care about we want to grab it from the orders table so this table and then now we set up our filters so we're just looking for only rows where product name equals wireless mouse because that's the product she bought and then um and the order date is January 10 to 20 2024 so we're just saying whenever these two conditions are met that's when we want to grab those records and Actually look at them so that's an example of like what a SQL query is doing and then on

the other side of things we have unstructured data which is usually the best use case for unstructured data going to a vector database based on my experience is just vectorizing a ton of text so big walls of text chunking them up throwing them into a vector database and they're placed you know based on the meaning of those chunks and then can be grabbed Back semantically intelligently by the agent but anyways this is a quick visualization that I made right over here let's say we have um a t tons of PDFs and they're just basically policy

information we take that text we chunk it up so we're just splitting it based on the characters within the actual content and then each chunk becomes a ve a vector which is just one of these dots in this threedimensional space and they're placed in different areas like I Said based on the actual meaning of these chunks so super cool stuff right so then when the agent wants to you know look in the vector database to pull some stuff back it basically makes a query and vectorizes that query because it will be placed near other things

that are related and then it will grab like everything that's near it and that's how it pulls back if we're doing like a nearest neighbor search but don't want to get too technical here I wanted to Show an example of like why that's beneficial so on the left we have product information about blankets and on the right we also have product information about blankets and we just decided on the right it's a vector database on the left it's a relational database and so let's say we hooked this up to you know a customer chatbot on

a website and the customer asked I'm looking for blankets that are fuzzy now if it was a relational database the Agent would be looking through and querying for you know where the description contains the word fuzzy or maybe material is contains the word fuzzy and because there's no instances of the word fuzzy right here we may get nothing back but on the other side of things when we have the vector database because each of these vectors are placed based on the meaning of their description and their material the agent will be able to figure out

okay if I go Over here and I pull back these vectors these are probably fuzzy because I understand that it's cozy fleece or it's um you know handwoven cotton so that's like like why there's some extra benefits there because maybe it's not a word for word match but the agent can still intelligently pull back stuff that's similar based on the actual context of the chunks and the meaning okay moving on to number five why prompting is critical for AI agents um We already talked about it a little bit I guess in the context is everything

section because prompting is giving it more context but this should be a whole lesson in itself because it is truly an art and you have to find that fine line between you don't want over prompt it and you want to minimize your token usage but you also want to give it enough information but um when people think of prompting they think of chbt as you can see right here where you have The luxury of talking to chat it's going to send you something back you can tell it hey make that shorter or hey make it

more professional it'll send it back and you can keep going back and forth and making adjustments until you're happy with it and then you can finally accept the output but when we're dealing with AI agents and we're trying to make these systems autonomous we only have one shot at it so we're going to put in ass system prompts right here that the agent Will be to look at every time there's like an input and we have to trust that the output and the actions taken before the output are going to be high quality and so

like I said this is a super interesting topic and if you want to see a video where I did more of a deep dive on it you can check it out I'll tag it right here um where I talked about like this lesson but the biggest thing I learned building these agents over the past six months was reactive prompting Is way better than proactive prompting admittedly when I started prompting I did it all wrong I was lazy and I would just like grab a custom GPT that I saw someone use on YouTube for you know

a prompt generator that generates the most optimized prompts for your AI agents I think that that's honestly a bunch of garbage I even have created my own AI agent system prompt architect and I posted it in my community and people are using it but I wouldn't recommend to use It to be honest um nowadays I think that the best practice is to write all of your prompts from scratch by hand from the beginning and start with nothing so that's what I meant by saying reactive prompting because if you're grabbing a whole you know let's say

you have 200 lines of prompts and you throw it in here into your system prompts and then you just start testing your agent you don't know what's going on and why the agent's behaving as it is you could have An issue pop up and you add a different line in the system prompt and the issue that you originally were having is fixed but now a new issue's popped up and you're just going to be banging your head against the wall trying to debug this thing by taking out lines testing adding lines testing it's just going

to be such a painful process when in reality what you should do is reactive prompt so start with nothing in the system prompt give your agent a tool and Then test it throw in a couple queries and see if you're liking what's coming back you're going to observe that behavior and then you have the ability to correct the system prompt reactively So based on what you saw you can add in a line and say hey don't do that or you know this worked let's add another tool and add another prompt now or another line in

the prompt because what we know right now is that it's working based on what we have that way if we do add a Line and then we test and then we observe the behavior and we see that it broke we know exactly what broke this Automation and we can pinpoint it rather than if we threw in a whole pre-generated system prompt so that's the main reason why I don't do that anymore and then it's just that Loop of test reprompt test again reprompt um and what's super cool about this is because you can basically hard

prompt your agent with things in the system prompt because You're able to show it examples of you know hey I just asked you this and you took these steps that was wrong don't do that again this is what you should have done and basically if you give it that example within the system prompt you're training this thing to not behave like that and you're only improving the consistency of your agent's performance so the the key elements of a strong AI agent prompt and this isn't like every single time these are the five things You should

have because every agent's different for example if you're creating a context creation agent you wouldn't need a tool section really if it's not if it doesn't have any tools You' just be prompting it about its output and about its role but anyways the first one that we're talking about is role this is sort of just like telling the AI who it is so this could be as simple as like you're a legal assistant specializing in corporate law your job is to summarize Contracts in simple terms and flag risky Clauses something like that it gives the

AI clear purpose and it helps the model understand the tone and the scope of its job without this the AI is not going to know how to frame responses and you're going to get either very random outputs or you're going to get very vague outputs that are very clearly generated by AI then of course you have the context which is going to help the agent understand you know what is actually Coming in every time because essentially you're going to have different inputs every time even though the system prompt is the same so saying like this

is what you're going to receive this is what you're going to do with it um this is your end goal so that helps tailor the whole process and make it more seamless as well that's one common mistake I actually see with people's prompting when they start is they forget to Define what are you going to be getting every Time because the agents either going to be getting a ton of different emails or maybe a ton of different articles but it needs to know okay this information that you're throwing at me what is it why am

I getting it then of course the tool instructions so when you're building a tools agent this is the most important thing in my mind yes it's good to add rules and show like when you use each thing but having an actual section for your tools is going to increase the Consistency a lot at least that's what I found because this tells the AI exactly what tools are available when to use them how they work um and this is really going to ensure correct tool usage rather than the AI trying to go off of like these

sort of guidelines because it's a non deterministic workflow and um trying trying to guess of which one will do what and um yeah have a tool section and Define your tools then you've got your rules and constraints and this is Going to help prevent hallucination it's going to help the agent stick to sort of like a standard operating procedure now you just have to be careful here because you don't want to say something like do all of these in this order every time because then it's like why are you even using an agent you should

just be using a workflow right but anyways just setting some foundational like if x do y if Z do a like that sort of thing and then finally examples which I think are Super super important but I would never just put these in here blind I would only use examples to directly counter and directly C uh correct something that's happened so what I alluded to earlier with the hard prompting so let's say you give the agent an input it calls tool one and then it gives you an output that's just incorrect completely incorrect you'd want

to give it in the example you could show okay here's the input I just gave you now here's what You should have done call tool two and then call tool three and then give me the output and then it knows like okay that's what I did this is what I should have done so if I ever get an input similar to this I can just call these two tools because I know that's an example of like how I should behave so hard prompting is really really going to come in handy and not just in the

examples but also just with the rest of your system prompts all right moving on To number six we have scaling agents can be a nightmare and this is all part of like one of the hard shoots I talked about earlier where a lot of the stuff you see online is a great proof of concept a great MVP but if you were to try to push this into production in your own business you're going to notice it's not there yet because when you first build out these AI agents everything can seem to work fine it's a

demo it's cool it really opens your eyes to you know The capabilities but it hasn't usually gone under that rigorous testing and evaluation and setting up these guard rails um and all of that you know continuous monitoring that you need to do to evaluate its performance before you can push it out to all you know 100 users that you want to eventually push it out to you know on a single user level if you have a few hallucinations every once in a while it's not a huge deal but as you scale the use case You're

just going to be scaling hallucinations and scaling problems and scaling all these failures so that's where it gets tricky you can start to get retrieval issues as your database grows it's going to be harder for your agent to cut through the noise and grab what it needs so you're going to get more you know inaccuracies you're going to have some different performance bottlenecks and the agent's you know latency is going to increase you're Going to start to get inconsistent outputs and you're going to experience all those edge cases that you hadn't thought of when you

were the only one testing because you know there's just an infinite amount of scarios that an agent could be exposed to so a good little lesson learned here would be to scale vertically before you start to try to scale horizontally which um we'll break that down and I made this little visualization so we can see what that Means so let's say we want to help this business with their customer support Sales inventory and HR management rather than building out little building blocks of tools within each of these processes let's try to perfect one area first

vertically and then we'll start to move across the organization and look at doing other things and scaling to more users so because we can focus on this one area we can set up a knowledge base and set up like the data sources and Build that automated pipeline we can set up how this kind of stuff gets organized with our subw workflows we can set up you know an actual agent that's going to have different tool calls and within this process what we have over here are evaluations monitoring performance and then setting up those guard rails

because we're testing throughout this you know ecosystem vertically and and getting exposure to all these different edge cases before we try to move into Other you know areas where we need to basically start this whole process again we want to have done the end to end system first understand you know the problems that may arise how to make it robust and how to evaluate and you know iterate over it before we start making more automations and so like I alluded to earlier if you try to start scaling horizontally too quick before you've done all these

testing you are going to notice that hallucinations are going to Increase your retrieval quality is going to drop as more us users come in the agent's handling more memory it's handling more um more knowledge in its database to try to cut through your response times are going to slow and then you're just going to get more inconsistent results and so you can do things like you know setting strict retrieval rules and guard rails you could do stuff like segmenting your data into different Vector databases based on The context or different name spaces or different you

know relational databases you could use stuff like um asynchronous processing or caching in order to improve that response time and then you could also look at doing stuff like only you know um having an agent evaluate and making sure the confidence on these responses are above a certain threshold otherwise we'll you know request human help and not actually respond ourselves or the agent wouldn't respond itself so The seventh one is that no code tools like n8n have their limits they're super great they're really empowering non-developers to get in here and spin up some really cool

automations and it's really like the barrier to entry is so low you can learn how to build the stuff really quickly which is why I think it's awesome and you know it's the main tool that I use um personally and also within my agency but when you start to get into what we Just talked about with lesson number six scaling and making these things really robust and production ready you may notice some limits with no code tools like NN now the reason I got into building stuff like this is because you know obviously non-programmer and

it has a really nice dragon drop interface where you can build these workflows very visually without writing scripts so NN is you know basically open source because you can self-host it the code is Accessible um and it's built on top of Lang chain which is just like a basically a language that helps connect to different things and create these like agents um and because of that it's just wrapped up really pretty for us in a graphical user interface where we can interact with it in that Dragon drop way without having to get in there and

Hands-On keyboard write code and it has a ton of pre-built Integrations as you can see right here connect anything to Everything um I think there's like a thousand Integrations right here and all of these different Integrations are API calls they're just wrapped up once again in a pretty way for us in a user interface and like I talked about earlier when I started I didn't even know what an API was so the barrier entry was super low I was able to configure this stuff easily and besides these built-in Integrations they have these really simple tool

calls so Development is really fast with Building workflows compared to traditional coding um the modularity aspect because you can basically build out a workflow you can save that as a tool and then you can call that tool from any other workflow you want so once you build out a function once you've basically got it there forever and it can be reused which is really cool and then my favorite aspect about NAD and the visual interface is the visual debugging Because rather than having 300 lines of code and you know you're getting errors in line 12

and line 45 you're going to see it's going to be red or it's going to be green and you know if it's green you're good and if you see red there's an error so you know exactly usually you know exactly where the problems coming from and you're able to get in there look at the execution data and get to the bottom of it pretty quick but overall these no code platforms are Great they allow us to connect apis we can connect to pretty much anything because we have an HTTP request within nen they're going to

be really really good for rule-based decision- making like super solid um if we're creating workflows that's just going to do some data manipulation and transferring data around you know your typical ETL based on the structured logic super robust you can make some really really awesome basic AI powered workflows where you're Integrating different llms you've got all the different chat models basically that you can connect to um for you know different classification or content generation or Outreach anything like that um your multi- agentic workflows because like I said earlier you have the aspect of creating different

tools as workflows as well as creating agents as workflows that you can call on from multiple agents so you can really get into some cool multi- agentic Inception Thing going on with with agents calling agents calling agents um and passing data between different workflows and then just the orchestration of AI Services coordinating multiple AI tools within a single process so that's the kind of stuff that NN is going to be super super good at and now the hidden limitations of these no code AI workflow SL agent Builders let's get into it now in my my

opinion this stuff really just comes down to when we're trying to get Into like Enterprise Solutions at scale with a ton of users and a ton of authentication and a ton of data because if you're building out your own internal automations you're going to be solid like there's not going to be limitations if you're building out you know proof of Concepts and MVPs um YouTube videos creating content like you can do it all I would say but when you need to start processing you know massive data sets that are going to scale to thousands or

Millions of users your performance can slow down or even fail and that's maybe where you'd want to r on some custom code backend to actually spin up these more robust functionalities in these agentic systems tool calling is really really critical the agent needs to be able to decide which one to use and do it efficiently and like I talked about NAD is built on top of Lang chain it provides a structured way to call AI models and apis but it lacks some of That flexibility of writing that really custom code within there for complex decisionmaking

and then when it comes to authentication at scale it can struggle with like secure large scale Authentication and data Access Control obviously you can hook up to external systems to help with some of that processing but when it comes to maybe like handling oo tokens and all these encrypted credentials and session management not that it's not doable with Nadn um it just seems like getting in there with some custom code it could be quicker and more robust and also that's coming from someone who doesn't actually do that myself um just some stuff I've heard and

you know with what's going on within the agency now ultimately it seems like if you you are delivering this stuff at scale for some big clients um the best approach is going to be a mix a hybrid of no code and custom code because you can use nadn to spin up Stuff really quick you've got that modularity you can orchestrate automate you know connect to anything you need but then working in every once in a while some custom python script for some of that complex you know large scale processing and data handling and when you

combine these two together you're going to be able to spin some stuff up a lot quicker and that's going to be pretty robust and Powerful now if you really are serious about building out These AI automations and you're coming from a background of you know not a programmer so it seems a little intimidating I would definitely encourage you to check out my paid Community I have a full course in there about building a agents um we also have deep di topics on things like rag Vector databases apis and HTTP requests I'm also doing a lot

of step-by-step and live builds in the community which I think are the best way to actually learn You know data flow live troubleshooting like the the the mindset and the creative problem solving that goes into building out these automations and on top of that we've got five live calls per week make sure you're never getting stuck you can get in there get your questions answered and it's a growing fast community so we have a ton of people in there everyone's kind of filtering in to learn about building AI automations um we've got beginners we've Got

people that are pretty Advanced we've got some people that are pretty techy so all the kind of questions you may have with troubleshooting or setting up your environments or even navigating if you're running an agency and you want to hear more about like how other people are pricing or approaching Discovery calls and actually deploying stuff on a client server whatever it is is um a great place to just be surrounded by like-minded people that are trying to do Similar things and ultimately you know the space is so new it's moving so fast it's a very

collaborative space right now which I love so just surrounding yourself with people that are trying to do the same things as you and winning all together as a community so would love to see you guys in that Community um but otherwise you know my channel is pretty much all about making this kind of stuff accessible to all types of people from all types of backgrounds my Focus obviously is how can we build this stuff really easily um simplify all of it down and also give you guys all my templates that I make in my YouTube

videos for free in my free school community so that way you can get in there download them plug them in and just like understand what's going on and how the data flows so um I hope to see you know you and some other videos I do a lot of stuff on the channel so check out you know other tutorials I've made And definitely let me know what else you want to see and also what you thought of this you know sort of style of content so really appreciate you guys making it to the end of

this one as always if you appreciate this video If it helped you if you learned something new definitely give it a like it helps me out a ton and I will see you guys in the next one thanks everyone