ADE 201: Systems Design
ADE Foundations got you to your first agentic pipeline. ADE Systems Design takes you to something harder: a system that holds up in production. By the end of this course, you'll know how to choose the right architecture for a given use case, engineer context at depth, verify agentic output before it costs you, govern what agents can and cannot do, and operationalize the whole stack without your LLM bill eating your infrastructure budget.
This is a practitioner course. It assumes you've completed ADE 101, have built at least one agentic workflow, and have opinions about what went wrong. The tone is still direct. The tradeoffs are named honestly.
What's in this course
| # | Module | Time | What you'll learn |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Architecture Patterns | 25 min | Single-agent vs. multi-agent vs. hierarchical — when to use each and what failure mode you're signing up for |
| 2 | Context Engineering | 30 min | The discipline that separates reliable agents from brittle ones — go deeper than intent specification into full context stack design |
| 3 | Trust and Verify | 25 min | How to check agentic output systematically, catch confabulation before it reaches stakeholders, and build behavioral test suites |
| 4 | Governance & Security | 25 min | Guardrails that enable speed — not just restrict it. Trust gradients, secrets management, PII handling, and prompt injection defense |
| 5 | Agentic DataOps | 25 min | CI/CD for agent-generated code, failure automation, and the cost optimization strategies that make production viable |
| 6 | Capstone Lab | 90 min | Apply all five 201 concepts to the Expeditions flow from ADE 101: assess architecture, deepen the context stack, verify output, set a trust level, and create a Production Deployment |
Total estimated time: ~3 hours (self-paced)
What you'll be able to do
- Choose the right architecture pattern (single-agent, multi-agent, hierarchical) for a given use case — and explain the tradeoffs you're accepting
- Design a full context stack: system instructions, rules files, schema metadata, lineage, data profiles, and business rules
- Apply the three-check verification framework to catch agentic errors before they reach stakeholders
- Set up approval gates, secrets management, and prompt-injection defenses for a production agentic system
- Implement cost optimization strategies that can reduce LLM inference spend significantly without meaningful quality loss
Prerequisites
ADE 101: Foundations (or equivalent experience). You should be comfortable with the CTT framework (Context, Tools, Triggers), have built at least one agentic pipeline, and understand the basic agentic loop. If you haven't taken ADE 101, start there before continuing.
The Module 6 capstone lab uses the Expeditions project from ADE 101. You'll take the monthly revenue flow you built there through five production-readiness gates: assess the architecture against the CTTG framework, deepen the context stack with scoped rules and a custom Failure Investigator agent, verify the output using the three-check framework, document a trust level with measurable promotion criteria, and create a Production Deployment so your automations actually run. Plan about 90 minutes, using the same free Ascend trial account. The design patterns — architecture assessment, context engineering, verification, governance, DataOps — apply to any agentic stack.
Each module ends with a short knowledge check (2–3 questions). Pass all of them to unlock the ADE Systems Design certificate at the bottom of this page. Retries are allowed — there's no penalty for trying again.
Start here
Module 1 answers the question every team faces once they're convinced: which pattern do we use?
Begin with Module 1: Architecture Patterns →