Join us in Atlanta for Build an Agent Day and craft your own AI agent live and in person! One day. One working AI agent, built by you.
Build an Agent Day - Atlanta
Walk in with a workflow you hate. Walk out with an agent that does it for you.
Build An Agent Day is a one-day, hands-on workshop where you codify a real task from your job as a working AI agent — and leave with the design pattern to do it again and again. No slide decks to take home. By 6 PM you have something running against your own Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account.
It's a program of All Things AI and All Things Open, built for the people who do the work: business professionals, government leaders, and K-12 and higher-ed educators. If you can write a clear how-to email, you can build an agent here.
What you'll build
Over eight hours, you'll build the same workflow across three agent stacks and pick the one that fits your environment:
- Claude Cowork (Anthropic) — for knowledge workers
- ChatGPT Agents (OpenAI) — for enterprise IT
- Manus — for research-heavy roles
The arc: pick a workflow you own (reports, intake, scheduling, drafting, research), capture your expertise as a skill an AI can follow, wire it into your stack, and ship it the same day. You'll demo it before you leave.
A sample of the day
- Crack Open the Agent — the three primitives (model, tools, memory) and the agent loop, narrated tool call by tool call
- Pick Your First Three Agents — Mark's S.M.A.R.T. framework to sort your tasks by AI readiness and match each to AI, Human, or Both
- Write Your First Skill — the anatomy of a SKILL.md, plus worked examples including an "anti-slop" quality skill and a composed website-audit skill
- Ship an Autonomous Research Agent — build a Morning Brief in Manus that triages email, preps your calendar, and ranks the day's industry news
- Working lunch, three stacks, three tables — poke at all three with food in front of you
The full eight-hour arc runs at every city stop. Because every workshop is live, the schedule flexes to the room.
Who's teaching
Mark Hinkle — Workshop instructor. Founder of The AIE Network (250,000+ subscribers), co-founder of All Things AI, 30+ years in emerging tech across cloud.com, the Linux Foundation, and the Node.js Foundation. An operator, not a consultant.
Todd Lewis — Co-founder, All Things Open. More than a decade running technology events in the Carolinas (POSCON, Open Source 101, All Things Open).
What's included
- Eight hours of hands-on building
- All three agent stacks
- Meals and materials
- The working agent you walk out with
- A year of community access across All Things Open, All Things AI, and The AIE Network — meetups, virtual events, and ongoing learning
Pricing
- Early bird: $297 (first 100 registrants)
- Standard: $397
All tiers are all-inclusive. Most employers reimburse the ticket under professional development or continuing education budgets — receipts formatted for expense reports available on request.
Lineup
Mark R. Hinkle
Todd Lewis
Good to know
Highlights
- 9 hours
- ages 18+
- In person
Refund Policy
Location
Atlanta Tech Village - Buckhead
3423 Piedmont Road Northeast
Atlanta, GA 30305
How do you want to get there?

Agenda
-
Registration, coffee, and welcome.
Pick up your badge, grab Carolina coffee, and meet the cohort you'll be building alongside. Bring the laptop you actually use at work, signed in to your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account.
-
Welcome & Introductions.
Co-founders Mark Hinkle (The AIE Network) and Todd Lewis (All Things Open) open the day with what every attendee ships before sundown: three working agents and a method for building more on Monday. Ground rules: build first, debate later.
-
Crack Open the Agent.
By the end of this block you can draw an agent on a napkin and explain what each piece does. We cover the three primitives — model, tools, memory — and the agent loop (plan, act, observe, repeat). Live demo: the same task done badly (no tools) and done well (tools + memory), narrated tool call by tool call. You walk out with: a working mental model of how agents think and act.