Today: Let's Create Our First Agent Using smolagents — Unit 1's capstone. Deployed here: BryceZJ/First_agent_template.
This is where Days 1–7 stopped being theory. smolagents wraps everything I built by hand on Day 7 — the manual message loop, the stop-and-parse hack, the prompt engineering — into a CodeAgent: an agent that reasons in the Thought → Action → Observation cycle, but instead of emitting JSON for its actions, it writes and executes actual Python. More expressive, and much less scaffolding to hand-roll.
Setup was: duplicate the template Space, drop a Hugging Face API token in as a secret, and wire tools into app.py. The model behind it is Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, served through HF's API — same serverless pattern as Day 7, just no longer hand-managing the request/response cycle myself.
The part worth remembering: adding a tool is just a decorated Python function with a docstring — directly the "tools are functions with a description" idea from Day 4, now literally the mechanism instead of a concept. I wired in the timezone tool from the template plus web search, and the agent decides on its own when to reach for either.
First one is live and running. Small, but it's the first time in this course a thing I built is actually deployed and callable by anyone, not just running in a notebook.