Agent ArenaClickHouse Workshops

Instructor track

Timing, talk tracks, common failures, and reset steps for facilitators.

This is the Instructor track: the facilitator's companion to the Learner track. Each module mirrors its learner counterpart and adds timing guidance, talk tracks, common failure modes, and reset steps for running the session live.

The workshop follows one continuous arc: select the base model → measure offline → release and detect → investigate with a human → prove and monitor the improvement.

Total timing

ModuleLearner lessonInstructor notesOutcomeBudget
00SetupnotesConnect OpenRouter, ClickHouse, and Langfuse; seed the Agent Arena data.20 min
01Select the base modelnotesRun the contest and select a configuration by cost per correct answer.20 min
02Measure offlinenotesRead the winner's offline scores and traces before release.15 min
03Release and detectnotesRelease the stale policy and capture the evaluator-pass/user-fail disagreement.15 min
04InvestigatenotesComplete an evidence-first human diagnosis and corrected-output handoff.20 min
05Close the loopnotesExpand the golden dataset, prove the fix, and enable calibrated online protection.25 min

That is 115 minutes — about 1 hour 55 minutes — of hands-on work for the full session, plus transitions between modules.

Room setup

  • One .env per learner (or per pair), populated from their own OpenRouter, Langfuse Cloud, and ClickHouse Cloud accounts — credentials are not shared across learners, because Module 00 also provisions a dedicated arena_ro read-only ClickHouse user per seed.
  • A projector view of your own Langfuse Cloud project, kept separate from learner projects, for experiment, production-trace, annotation, and evaluator walkthroughs in Modules 01–05.
  • A terminal with scripts/arena.sh status ready to run at any point — it reports whether the dashboard API and web UI are up, and prints row counts for each v_* view. scripts/arena.sh up seeds the ClickHouse business dataset and starts the local services; benchmark results live in Langfuse (with no Aurora, ClickPipes, or ClickStack in this workshop).

Prerequisites checklist

Confirm each of these before Module 00 starts, ideally the day before:

  • Learners have created (or been given) accounts on OpenRouter, Langfuse Cloud, and ClickHouse Cloud, with real API keys — not placeholder values.
  • Learners have cloned the repo and can create a Python virtualenv (python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate && pip install -r requirements.txt).
  • Node.js is installed for the web Chat tab (cd web && npm install), needed starting in Module 00 (the dashboard) and again in Module 03 (the Chat tab).
  • You have read eval/langfuse_evaluators/README.md — Module 01's one-time Langfuse evaluator setup is the most fiddly step in the whole session and is worth rehearsing.
  • You can run source .env && scripts/arena.sh up end to end yourself once before the session, so you know what "seeded correctly" looks like when a learner's run doesn't match it.

Per-module notes

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