AI Agents from Scratch: A Beginner's LLM Workshop

Build a working AI agent from scratch online on 29 August 2026, using RAG, MCP, Python and LangGraph in a practical, beginner-friendly workshop. Hosted by the London Data Science, ML, AI Platform community, this focused session is designed to help you move beyond reading about AI agents and start building one. The workshop is advertised as a hands-on, 90-minute introduction to the 2026 LLM stack, with an emphasis on the tools and patterns currently used to create grounded, tool-using, stateful agents. ## What you’ll build Rather than spending the session on abstract theory, you’ll work through the core components of an agent and connect them into a functioning project: - A retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline grounded in your own documents - An MCP server in Python, created in fewer than 20 lines of code - A stateful LangGraph agent that orchestrates multi-step reasoning - Tool calling through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), described by the organiser as a universal standard adopted by Anthropic, OpenAI and Google The goal is to leave with both a working agent in your GitHub account and a clearer mental model of how today’s LLM application stack fits together. ## Who it’s for This workshop is aimed at developers, founders and technical leaders who want to ship AI agents rather than simply follow high-level discussions about them. It is presented as a beginner’s workshop, but attendees should be comfortable working on a laptop and using Python. Bring a computer with Python 3.10 or later installed; an API key will be provided. ## Speaker and format The session is led by Dr Yasin Ceran, an associate professor at KAIST in South Korea who also teaches at San Jose State University. His experience spans data analysis, mathematical modelling, Apache Spark, SQL, Python, R, data mining and statistics. The published agenda includes arrival, socialising and opening remarks, followed by the main hands-on workshop and a concluding Q&A. The agenda is listed in PDT, beginning at 11:00 am, so attendees should check the Meetup listing and registration confirmation for the relevant local time. The event itself is online, and the organiser asks participants to register via Zoom for a reminder.… Register for this event