Build Your First AI Agent — Complete Guide

A step-by-step weekend guide to building a real AI agent from scratch — no coding experience needed. You will learn the core agent loop (goal → tool use → reasoning → result), build a working Python agent using the Claude API, add real tools like web search and file reading, and extend it with your own custom tools. By the end, you will understand how autonomous AI agents actually work by having built one yourself.

1. Get a Claude API key at console.anthropic.com 2. Install Python (python.org) and confirm with: python --version 3. Create a project folder and virtual environment: python -m venv venv && source venv/bin/activate 4. Install the Anthropic library: pip install anthropic 5. Use Claude to generate your agent.py starter script (prompt included in the guide) 6. Set your API key: export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your_key_here 7. Run: python agent.py