Building Agentic AI: A 5-Week Hands-On Bootcamp with the OpenAI Agents SDK

Building Agentic AI: A 5-Week Bootcamp
Join us for a five-week, hands-on bootcamp meeting every Thursday, where we’ll learn how to build agentic AI applications using the OpenAI Agents SDK. We’ll start with the foundations, including effective prompting, models, instructions, and structured outputs, and progressively build toward agents that can use tools, maintain memory, interact with MCP servers, apply guardrails, and collaborate in multi-agent systems.
Along the way, we’ll work with Python, Pydantic, and the OpenAI Agents SDK to build practical agents while developing a deeper understanding of how modern agentic AI systems work.

What We'll Cover
Session 1: Agent Foundations — September 10

• Effective Prompting
• Understanding Tokens
• Models and Instructions
• Building Your First Agent

Session 2: Controlling Agent Behavior — September 17

• Pydantic Fundamentals
• Dynamic Instructions
• Structured Outputs
• Context and Runtime Data

Session 3: Memory and Tools — September 24

• Memory and Sessions
• Creating Tools
• Tool Calling
• Using Multiple Tools
• Tracing and Debugging

Session 4: Building More Capable Agents — October 1

• Single-Agent Capstone
• Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• Connecting Agents to MCP Tools
• Guardrails

Session 5: Multi-Agent Systems — October 8

• Multi-Agent Design Patterns
• Handoffs and Agents as Tools
• Multi-Agent Development
• Multi-Agent Capstone

Prerequisites: A basic understanding of Python is recommended. You do not need prior experience building AI agents or working with the OpenAI Agents SDK. Familiarity with Python classes, functions, type hints, and basic API usage will help you get the most out of the bootcamp. We’ll introduce the Pydantic concepts needed as we go.

Before the First Session
Please complete a few setup steps before the bootcamp begins:

• Install Anaconda
• Install the openai-agents, tiktoken, and transformers libraries
• Create an OpenAI account if you do not already have one
• Create and securely save an OpenAI API key
• Make sure your OpenAI API account is ready for API usage

If you are new to Python or installing Python libraries, don't worry. We have prepared a simple step-by-step setup guide:
Bootcamp Setup Guide

We hope you join us!

AGENDA

• 6:00 p.m. – Welcome
• 6:05 p.m. – Bootcamp Introduction
• 6:10 p.m. – Effective Prompting
• 6:40 p.m. – Context Window & Token Usage
• 7:00 p.m. – BREAK
• 7:10 p.m. – Understanding Tokens
• 7:20 p.m. – Tokenizers in Practice
• 7:50 p.m. – BREAK
• 8:00 p.m. – Models & Instructions
• 8:30 p.m. – Building Your First Agent
• 8:50 p.m. – Questions/Discussion
• 9:00 p.m. – End