Live Building Agents #3: Agent Foundations (Educational workshop)

Beginner-friendly hands-on workshop for quick start in building agents.

Goals:

• Learn the main building blocks of an agent
• Practice building your own agents
• Demystify agent harnesses and learn how to use them

What to expect
We'll speak in detail about the agent loop, tool calls, message history, and LLM APIs. We'll also explore a minimalistic harness, Pi (both using it and understanding how it's built).
As usual, we'll wrap up with a small competition for the agents we've built. The agents will play escape games on Agent Fight Club .

Who is this event for
This event will be most helpful for people who have never built agents, or who have built agents with high-level tools without looking under the hood.

For non-technical people: the core of the content (explanations of agent building blocks, usage of Pi) is intended to be understood by a general audience. However, some sections will involve looking at code, so be ready for parts that are harder to follow than others (that shouldn't stop you from following the overall picture though).

Prerequisites:

• Laptop (Wi-Fi access will be provided)
• If you have a Windows laptop - please install Windows Subsystem for Linux (if some of you will be struggling with it we'll help you tomorrow, but it would be great if the majority installs it prior to the workshop, so that we won't spend time on it).
• If you have Mac or Linux - no additional preparation is needed.
• Readiness to spend approximately €10 on OpenRouter credits

Community
You can join agent builders community in Discord