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/ Basic The Solution Toolbox Topic 5 lessons ~4h
Lessons, in order 01
The Pattern Ladder There are five ways to make a model useful, and they form a ladder. Each rung adds capability and adds cost, latency and things that can break. Basic
45 min
02
Retrieval and Knowledge Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is how a model answers from information it was never trained on. When a question arrives, the system first searches your documents or data for the … Basic
50 min
03
Workflows and Agents In a workflow, your code decides what happens next and the model does each step. In an agent, the model decides what happens next: it is given a goal and a set of tools, and it loops — … Basic
50 min
04
Choosing a Model There is no best model. There is a best model for this task, at this volume, under these constraints, this quarter. Public leaderboards tell you which models are worth testing; they do not … Basic
45 min
05
The Cloud AI Platforms Most enterprises do not call model makers directly. They reach models through the cloud they already use, because the contract, the security approval and the private network are already in … Basic
50 min
About this topic Almost every AI solution is one of five patterns, or a combination. This topic teaches each
pattern as an architect needs it: what it is for, what it costs, how it fails, and how to tell
when a simpler one would do. It ends with the two choices every design makes — which model,
and which platform.
# Lesson The question it answers 01 The Pattern Ladder Prompt, retrieval, workflow, agent or fine-tune — which is the least I need? 02 Retrieval and Knowledge How does the model answer from our documents and data, and what makes that hard? 03 Workflows and Agents When should the model follow my steps, and when should it choose its own? 04 Choosing a Model How do I pick a model with evidence instead of a leaderboard? 05 The Cloud AI Platforms What do AWS, Microsoft and Google each offer, and how do I choose?
The mechanisms behind these patterns — how a gateway, a retrieval pipeline or an agent loop is
built — are in AI System Design . This topic is about
choosing between them.