Getting Started with AI Agents

This article was originally published on do-nothing.ai. The canonical version is there. 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 Cl