Bob Belderbos: There Is No Magic: An AI Agent in 60 Lines of Python (opens in new tab)

Everybody talks about agents, and a lot of people assume they're some new kind of model. They aren't. An agent is a small amount of plumbing around an LLM you already understand. Let's build one from scratch in Python and see exactly what that plumbing is. The formula An agent is: Model + Instructions + Memory + Tools + Execution Loop. Five parts. None of them is magic. The model is a brain in a jar: useful, fast, but stateless. It generates text; the code around it decides what to do with th...