TL;DR: I finished the Future AWS Agent Engineer nanodegree with three graded projects, each a customer support system for a fictional online store: one chatbot, then one agent, then five agents working together. Each project was harder than the one before and gave me fewer problems, because every mistake became a check in the next build. Here's how the three compare, what changed between them, and why the last one, which scored 120 out of 120, still got sent back for more proof before I passed the project.

My first project for this nanodegree went in on deadline day in August. It was a chatbot with one system prompt, graded by a rubric written for a product AWS had already stopped offering to new customers. It passed. I spent most of that day worried it didn't count, because I hadn't typed the code.

My second project went in a month later, built in one session.…