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Coursera

Agentic AI: Actor Models and Subagent Architecture

Pragmatic AI Labs via Coursera

Overview

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Learn to build production agentic AI systems using actor model foundations, subagent architecture patterns, and multi-language implementations. You will explore the actor paradigm for concurrent computation, where isolated processes communicate through message-passing with zero shared memory, eliminating race conditions and deadlocks that crash production systems. The course covers Actix supervision trees in Rust for fault-tolerant actor recovery and location transparency for seamless distributed scaling. You will implement Claude subagent patterns for task-specific AI configurations with isolated state and tool access, and examine pmat subagent architecture for code quality analysis through specialized delegation pipelines. The subagent module demonstrates supervised multi-agent coordination, applies Amdahl's law to understand parallelization limits of subagent systems, and explains why simple agents often outperform complex multi-agent designs. You will also explore small language models as efficient alternatives for agent reasoning tasks. The hands-on module covers actor implementations in three languages: Deno with TypeScript, Go with goroutines and channels, and Rust with ownership-based memory safety. You will build Go supervisor patterns for automatic actor recovery and examine a complete agentic coding project repository. By completing this course, you will be able to design fault-tolerant agentic systems using actor model principles, implement subagent architectures with Claude, and build actor patterns across multiple programming languages.

Syllabus

  • Actor Model Foundations
    • Covers agentic, actor, architecture, paradigm, and message.
  • Subagent Architecture
    • Covers Claude subagent delegation, pmat subagent pipelines, Clippy integration, Amdahl's Law for parallel agents, and small language model evaluation.
  • Multi-Language Actor Demos
    • Covers actor implementations in Deno (async/await), Go (goroutines and channels), and Rust (Actix), plus the Go supervisor pattern with crash recovery.
  • Capstone
    • Build a multi-language agentic AI system grounded in actor model principles, implementing supervision trees for fault tolerance, subagent delegation for task decomposition, and Claude-powered reasoning agents. The system demonstrates actor patterns in Rust, Go, and Deno, applies Amdahl's Law to optimize parallel subagent execution, and evaluates when simple agents outperform complex multi-agent designs.

Taught by

Alfredo Deza and Noah Gift

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