Summary

In this chapter, we conducted a deep dive into the OpenAI Agents SDK and what makes it special. We saw how its minimalist abstraction philosophy strips away boilerplate, letting plain Python do the talking, while still being powerful enough to create sophisticated AI agents and multi-agent solutions. We also saw how it was completely open sourced, inviting community scrutiny and enabling tons of extensions.We then looked at the core primitives that make up the SDK. In particular, we focused on the following:

• Agent: A thin wrapper that turns an LLM into an autonomous agent. It carries a name, system instructions, an optional tool belt, and a list of peer agents for potential handoffs.
• Runner: The execution engine that drives an agent’s iterative reasoning loop, handles retries, and enforces safety limits to prevent infinite spins.
• Tools: Ordinary Python functions (or hosted APIs/agents) decorated so the model can discover their...