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Getting Started with AI Agents
Everyone is talking about AI agents. Most of them have never built one.
This guide gets you from zero to a working agent in under an hour. No frameworks to install. No courses to finish. Just the loop that makes agents work, and a code example you can run right now.
An AI agent is a system that uses a language model to decide what actions to take, executes those actions via tools, and observes the results to determine next steps. That is it.
Core Concepts
The agent loop: Perceive → Reason → Act → Observe → Repeat. It is a while loop with an LLM inside it. The industry spent a year naming this.
Tools: Functions the agent can call. Examples: web search, code execution, database queries, API calls.
Memory: How the agent retains context across steps. Short-term (within a conversation), long-term (vector stores or databases).
Framework Options
| Framework | Language | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Claude API (native) | Python / JS | Simple tool use, direct control |
| LangChain | Python / JS | Complex chains, many integrations |
| AutoGen | Python | Multi-agent conversations |
| CrewAI | Python | Role-based multi-agent teams |
Quickstart with Claude
import anthropic
client = anthropic.Anthropic()
tools = [
{
"name": "get_weather",
"description": "Get the current weather for a location",
"input_schema": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"location": {"type": "string"}
},
"required": ["location"]
}
}
]
response = client.messages.create(
model="claude-opus-4-6",
max_tokens=1024,
tools=tools,
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "What's the weather in Paris?"}]
)
What to Build Next
You now have an agent that does exactly one thing. That is more than most people who talk about agents at conferences can say.
- Give it a second tool and let it choose which one to use
- Add a loop that feeds tool results back to the model until it says "done"
- Hook it up to something real: your email, your CRM, your content queue
When you are ready to hand actual business functions to agents, start with How to Delegate Tasks to AI Agents.
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