{"slug": "harnessing-your-first-agent", "title": "Harnessing Your First Agent", "summary": "Antfly is hosting a hands-on workshop, \"Harnessing Your First Agent,\" at Kiln in Portland on 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM PDT, teaching attendees to build a deployed agent grounded in their own documents. The session runs roughly 30 minutes of setup and social time, 60 minutes of structured walkthrough, and 30 minutes of Q+A, covering a local retrieval engine pointed at a folder of documents, giving an agent a search tool, embedding, chunking and reranking, and checking answers against sources. Attendees should bring a laptop, with a MacBook Pro, OpenAI Codex, OpenAI API billing, OpenAI tunnel permissions with Tunnels Read and Manage, ChatGPT Sites publishing access, the SearchAF macOS semantic search app, and a folder of documents listed as the happy-path setup.", "body_md": "[Back to Events](https://antfly.io/events)\n\nWorkshop\n\n# Harnessing Your First Agent\n\nA hands-on workshop on giving an agent the right context.\n\n- When\n5:00 PM to 7:00 PM PDT\n- Where\n- Kiln, Portland\n1120 SE Madison St, Portland, OR 97214\n\nThis is a hands-on workshop where you'll walk away with a deployed, purpose-built agent, grounded with your data.\n\nWe'll start from an agent with a blank prompt to one that answers questions exclusively from your own documents. We'll learn about what agents can see, how agents find knowledge, and how you can tell when it's guessing.\n\nWe'll have roughly 30 minutes of set up and social time, 60 minutes of structured walkthrough, and 30 minutes of Q+A.\n\n## What we cover\n\n- Setting up a local retrieval engine and pointing it at a folder of documents\n- Giving an agent a search tool, and reading what it does with it\n- Knowing when you should care about embedding, chunking and reranking\n- Checking answers against sources so you know when to trust them\n\n## Who it is for\n\nAnyone who have built (or wanted to build) agents that are grounded on their own data. No prior experience with retrieval systems or vector search needed.\n\n## What to bring\n\nA laptop.\n\nAnd while none of the following are strict requirements, they represent the happy path for the workshop. You can get a head start by having the following things ready for your environment:\n\n- **A MacBook Pro** : While not strictly required, the environments we'll be setting up in the workshop will assume a macOS environment.\n- **Coding Agent** : We recommend**OpenAI Codex** , as we'll be deploying our agent with ChatGPT sites.  (You can find similar tools with Claude Code Artifacts, or DIY deployments with Vercel, but the workshop will walk through things with Codex.)\n- **OpenAI API Billing** : Having a frontier model provider API with a usable API key will dive right in to the workshop. A ChatGPT subscription is separate from API billing; check the Platform account, not the chat app.\n- **OpenAI tunnel permissions** : The deployed agent reaches the retrieval engine on your laptop through a secure MCP tunnel. Creating one needs the Tunnels Read and Manage permissions in the same Platform organization as your API key. If you're not the organization admin, ask for them ahead of time.\n- **ChatGPT Sites access** : We deploy with Sites, and publishing access is separate from having ChatGPT. Confirm you can create a private site before the workshop.\n- **[SearchAF](https://searchaf.com)** : This is Antfly's macOS semantic search app, and will help to get an Antfly environment up and running.\n- **A Folder of Documents** : This will be our \"knowledge base\": all of the documents you want to ground your agent with.  This can be a Google Drive folder, a folder on your desktop.  The format of the documents in the knowledge base could be just about anything — markdown, Google/Office docs, HTML, PDF, MP3, etc.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/harnessing-your-first-agent", "canonical_source": "https://antfly.io/events/harnessing-your-first-agent", "published_at": "2026-09-25 02:43:47+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-25 03:01:18.996293+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-tools", "ai-products", "agent-protocols"], "entities": ["Antfly", "Kiln", "Portland", "OpenAI Codex", "ChatGPT Sites", "OpenAI API", "SearchAF", "Claude Code Artifacts"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/harnessing-your-first-agent", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/harnessing-your-first-agent.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/harnessing-your-first-agent.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/harnessing-your-first-agent.jsonld"}}