ZEO ITAM · Autumn 2026

The course Rod teaches live at ITAM in Autumn 2026, published as the 17-week semester runs, two classes a week. The subject is the dark factory applied beyond software, which the course calls the Zero-Employee Organization (ZEO): what changes when a business hands bounded work to AI agents, and how to tell a workflow that survives production from one that only impressed a demo. You measure a minutes baseline first, build an agent from scratch, then test the method on a fictional business with seeded errors a naive brief misses and a harnessed one catches. Unlike the other courses, it grows with the class: expect new lessons most weeks through December.

ZEO ITAM · Autumn 2026

What You'll Learn

Prerequisites

Syllabus

1Why This Course1 lesson · A short motivator: the organizational gap behind failures like Klarna's 2024-25 reversal and Project Vend, and what you'll be able to do by demo day

Why This Course

2Class 1 — Why Now, the Semester Contract, and Your First Baseline4 lessons · The three recorded units from Class 1: why agentic work matters this year, the semester-long case-study contract, and a hands-on lab to instrument one manual workflow before touching it with an agent

Class 1 — Why Now, the Semester Contract, and Your First Baseline

3Class 2 — Hire Your First Employee: How Agents Actually Work6 lessons · Session 02's five units: what an agent actually is, prompting as briefing, Claude Code from the inside, why the .claude/ directory is the organization, and the working practices that make it compound

Class 2 — Hire Your First Employee: How Agents Actually Work

Class 3 — Your Loop, Gone Industrial: Claude Code on a Real Business

Class 4 — Tokens, Context Windows, and How Attention Forgets the Middle

6Class 5 — Caching, Model Choice, and Planning3 lessons · Separate context capacity from cache economics, then compare sampling, reasoning budgets, and planner–executor workflows.

Class 5 — Caching, Model Choice, and Planning

7Class 6 — The Agent Organization: Loops, Memory, and Authority3 lessons · Build a recurring bounded loop with roles, tools, durable handoffs, and executable permissions.

Class 6 — The Agent Organization: Loops, Memory, and Authority

8Class 7 — Validation, Failure Recovery, and Work Records3 lessons · Check structured proposals against real inventory, handle failed calls, and preserve evidence for independent review.

Class 7 — Validation, Failure Recovery, and Work Records

9Class 8 — Applied Labs: First Calls and the Harness3 lessons · Two downloadable offline-first Python notebooks with worked arithmetic, refusal tests, transfer exercises, and optional live experiments.

Class 8 — Applied Labs: First Calls and the Harness

10Class 9 — Runtime Contracts, Pydantic, and Bounded Repair3 lessons · Build strict runtime schemas, validate nested proposals against real stock and budgets, and test a repair loop that stops without changing the rules. Two runnable Pydantic notebooks and a twelve-question scored review.

Class 9 — Runtime Contracts, Pydantic, and Bounded Repair

11Class 10 — Debugging, Fresh State, and Software Factories4 lessons · Trace an agent run, replace brittle word filters with typed decisions, test stock freshness, and specify a reporting factory with independent review. Includes an offline notebook and sixteen-question scored review.

Class 10 — Debugging, Fresh State, and Software Factories

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