Build an AI Agent
Time for Boot.dev to cash in on the AI hype.
If you've ever used Cursor or Claude Code as an "agentic" AI editor, you'll understand what we're building in this project.
We're building a toy version of Claude Code using Google's free Gemini API! As long as you have an LLM at your disposal, its actually surprisingly simple to build a (somewhat) effective custom agent.
What Does the Agent Do?
The program we're building is a CLI tool that:
- Accepts a coding task (e.g., "strings aren't splitting in my app, pweeze fix 🥺👉🏽👈🏽")
- Chooses from a set of predefined functions to work on the task, for example:
- Scan the files in a directory
- Read a file's contents
- Overwrite a file's contents
- Execute the python interpreter on a file
- Repeats step 2 until the task is complete (or it fails miserably, which is possible)
For example, I have a buggy calculator app, so I used my agent to fix the code:
> uv run main.py "fix my calculator app, its not starting correctly"
# Calling function: get_files_info
# Calling function: get_file_content
# Calling function: write_file
# Calling function: run_python_file
# Calling function: write_file
# Calling function: run_python_file
# Final response:
# Great! The calculator app now seems to be working correctly. The output shows the expression and the result in a formatted way.
Prerequisites
- Python 3.10+ installed (see the bookbot project for help if you don't already have it)
- uv project and package manager
- Access to a Unix-like shell (e.g. zsh or bash)
Learning Goals
The learning goals of this project are:
- Introduce you to multi-directory Python projects
- Understand how the AI tools that you'll almost certainly use on the job actually work under the hood
- Practice your Python and functional programming skills
The goal is not to build an LLM from scratch, but to instead use a pre-trained LLM to build an agent from scratch.
Assignment
To get started, make sure you have Python and the Boot.dev CLI installed and working.
Run and submit the CLI tests.
The Boot.dev CLI requires you to be signed in to submit your solution!
Copy/paste one of the following commands into your terminal:
Run
bootdev run 44e182d7-c2c6-4c7e-9313-1b078e301344
Submit
bootdev run 44e182d7-c2c6-4c7e-9313-1b078e301344 -s
Run the CLI commands to test your solution.
- echo "bootdev cli is ready!"
- Expecting exit code: 0
- Expecting stdout to contain all of:
- bootdev cli is ready!
- python3 --version
- Expecting exit code: 0
- Expecting stdout to contain all of:
- Python 3
Using the Bootdev CLI
The Bootdev CLI is the only way to submit your solution for this type of lesson. We need to be able to run commands in your environment to verify your solution.
You can install it here. It's a Go program hosted on GitHub, so you'll need Go installed as well. Instructions are on the GitHub page.