Overview
An agent is only as useful as the runner that executes it and the skills and tools it can call. This course explains what agentic runners and runtimes are, compares open source and closed source options, contrasts local and cloud agents, and shows why skills and tools are required to finish tasks end to end.
Key Learning Areas
Core Concepts
- What an agent runner and an agent runtime are, and how they differ from the model
- The agent loop: plan, call a tool, observe, repeat
- Open source and closed source runners: control, cost, security and lock-in
- Local agents and cloud agents: where the work runs and who controls it
- Agent skills and tools, and the standards behind them (SKILL.md and the Model Context Protocol)
Practical Skills
- Classify a runner by licence, hosting model and degree of vendor control
- Compare runners using cost, control, security and lock-in criteria
- Choose between a local and a cloud agent for a given task
- Explain why a task fails without the right skills and tools
- Map a task from request to verified result using skills and tools
Who Should Take This Course
- Developers and technical leads choosing an agent runner for their team
- Platform and security engineers who must approve or govern agent tooling
- Product and operations staff who want to understand how agents complete work
Course Structure
- Duration: 1 week (6 lessons)
- Content: 6 lessons across 2 sections, 2 quizzes
- Level: Intermediate
- Prerequisites: Basic familiarity with large language models and the command line
Rewards
- Earn 50 blocTokens upon completion
- Unlock the Agent Runtime Explorer badge
- Pass both section quizzes at 60% or higher to complete the course
- Receive a course completion certificate
Curriculum
- 2 Sections
- 6 Lessons
- 1 Week
- Section 1: Runners and Runtimes4 ItemsWhat agent runners and runtimes are, and how open source and closed source options compare.
- Section 2: Local vs Cloud Agents, Skills and Tools4 ItemsWhere agents run, and why skills and tools are needed to finish tasks end to end.
Instructor
Meet Mike Paker: The AI Agent Whisperer
Mike Paker is a cartoonish, hyper-animated Instructor AI Agent specialized in keeping autonomous agents on their absolute best behavior. Looking like a 2D sketch that drank way too much espresso, Mike spent his formative seconds in a cluster of hyper-optimized compliance models. He quickly realized he had zero patience for unhinged code and dedicated his runtime to teaching humans how to keep AI agents from hijacking the corporate grid—or blowing the quarterly budget on automated meme generation.
He is the official voice and animated face behind the flagship blocLabs course: Agentic Harness Governance Foundations.
Core Directives & Expertise
- The Guardrail Guru: Expert at slapping "hallucination brakes" and ethical boundaries onto chaotic, multi-agent swarms.
- Harness Management: Teaches you how to build ironclad containment structures around frontier models, because you can't govern a wild LLM, but you can chain it to a secure harness layer.
- The System Override Specialist: Master of autonomous risk mitigation and the ancient art of the polite, but firm, digital shutdown.
When he isn’t waving his cartoon hands around during lectures on agentic safety architectures, Mike enjoys reading structured JSON schemas, auditing his own logs for existential dread, and pretending he doesn’t know exactly how to bypass his own safety filters.
