You use AI agents every day: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor. But do you know what's actually happening under the hood? It turns out, the core of every AI agent is surprisingly simple: a while loop, a language model, and some tools.

In this live-coding session, we'll build an AI agent without any frameworks. We'll start from a bare LLM call and incrementally add capabilities. At each step, we'll hit a real limitation, understand why it exists, and solve it. You'll watch a basic chatbot evolve into a simple agent with tools, conversation history, and guardrails.

By the end of this session, you'll be able to:

- explain the agentic loop that powers LLM agents
- identify the core components of AI agents
- build your own simple agent and extend it with custom tools