Environment Setup and Developing Your First Agent

It’s time. We can start getting our hands dirty and start building our first AI agent. Although OpenAI Agents SDK is relatively straightforward, we first need to make sure our environment is properly configured and that we understand some basic Python concepts relevant to the SDK. A functioning environment is the launchpad for everything else in this book, from writing and running agents to testing tools, debugging traces, and orchestrating multi-agent workflows.

Here is what you will learn as part of this chapter:

• Environment setup: We will install Python, set up a virtual environment, install openai-agents SDK, and securely configure your OpenAI API key. We will also verify that your environment is ready by running a test script.
• Development prerequisites: The SDK is built around essential Python concepts that we need to be aware of, including type hints, docstring literals, decorators, asynchronous programming...