Agents From Scratch

Agents From Scratch

The repo is a guide to building agents from scratch. It builds up to an ["ambient"](https://blog.langchain.dev/introducing-ambient-agents/) agent that can manage your email with connection to the Gmail API. It's grouped into 4 sections, each with a notebook and accompanying code in the `src/email_assistant` directory. These section build from the basics of agents, to agent evaluation, to human-in-the-loop, and finally to memory. These all come together in an agent that you can deploy, and the principles can be applied to other agents across a wide range of tasks.


Environment Setup

Python Version

• Ensure you're using Python 3.11 or later.
• This version is required for optimal compatibility with LangGraph.

python3 --version

API Keys

• If you don't have an OpenAI API key, you can sign up here.
• Sign up for LangSmith here.
• Generate a LangSmith API key.

Set Environment Variables

• Create a .env file in the root directory:

# Copy the .env.example file to .env
cp .env.example .env

• Edit the .env file with the following:

LANGSMITH_API_KEY=your_langsmith_api_key
LANGSMITH_TRACING=true
LANGSMITH_PROJECT="interrupt-workshop"
OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_api_key

• You can also set the environment variables in your terminal:

export LANGSMITH_API_KEY=your_langsmith_api_key
export LANGSMITH_TRACING=true
export OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_api_key

Package Installation

**Recommended: Using uv (faster and more reliable)**

# Install uv if you haven't already
pip install uv

# Install the package with development dependencies
uv sync --extra dev

# Activate the virtual environment
source .venv/bin/activate

**Alternative: Using pip**

$ python3 -m venv .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
# Ensure you have a recent version of pip (required