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Would you be willing to point me to a primer of how I can get started with building agents? This week I experimented with building a simple planner/reviewer “a

by j_bum 1y ago

Would you be willing to point me to a primer of how I can get started with building agents? This week I experimented with building a simple planner/reviewer “agentic” iterative pipeline to automate an analysis workflow. It was effectively me dipping my toes into this field, and I am so floored to learn more. But I’m unsure of where to start, since everything seems so fast paced. I’m also unsure of how to experiment, since APIs rack up fees pretty quickly. Maybe local models?

ctoth 1y ago
You can directly use Claude Code via its scriptable API (things like --verbose --output-format json --input-format json --include-partial-messages and then use your existing Anthropic plan. Otherwise yeah you'll have to start using API tokens: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-agents-with-the-claude-agent-sdk https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-agents-with-t...
- apwell23 1y ago
  or you can pretend to be claude code in api calls
scottyeager 1y ago
Personally I found the mini SWE-agent to be a very approachable introduction to building agents: https://github.com/SWE-agent/mini-swe-agent https://github.com/SWE-agent/mini-swe-agent There are a number of free and cheap LLM options to experiment with. Google offers a decent free plan for Gemini (get some extra Google accounts). Groq has a free tier including some good open weight models. There's also free endpoints on OpenRouter that are limited but might be useful for long running background agents. DeepSeek v3.2, Qwen3, Kimi K2, and GLM 4.6 are all good choices for cheap and capable models. Local models are generally not a shortcut to cheap and effective AI. It's a fun thing to explore though.