Course Synthesis and Research Planning

We will close by returning to the foundation:

A prompt is the entire conversation at a point in time. The LLM responds to that prompt and has nothing else.

From this one idea we can reconstruct the course. Memory is information carried into a future conversation. Retrieval is a method for adding relevant context. Tools are structured messages from the LLM to the computer. Tool results are user messages from the computer back to the LLM. An agent loop is the repeated exchange of those messages. Skills determine what instructions and capabilities enter the conversation. Planning shapes how the conversation unfolds over time. Multi-agent systems coordinate several participants and several contexts. Evaluation asks whether the resulting conversations reliably support the claims we make.

The final planning question for each participant is therefore simple but demanding: What conversation must exist for this agent to do something useful, trustworthy, and genuinely new?