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Comment by teiferer | Hacker News Reader

Write an agent, it's easy! You will learn so much!

... let's see ...

client = OpenAI()

Um right. That's like saying you should implement a web server, you will learn so much, and then you go and import http (in golang). Yeah well, sure, but that brings you like 98% of the way there, doesn't it? What am I missing?

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That OpenAI() is a wrapper around a POST to a single HTTP endpoint:

    POST https://api.openai.com/v1/responses

Plus a few other endpoints, but it is pretty exclusively an HTTP/REST wrapper.

OpenAI does have an agents library, but it is separate in https://github.com/openai/openai-agents-python

I think you might be conflating an agent with an LLM.

The term "agent" isn't really defined, but its generally a wrapper around an LLM designed to do some task better than the LLM would on its own.

Think Claude vs Claude Code. The latter wraps the former, but with extra prompts and tooling specific to software engineering.

That's not an agent, it's an LLM. An agent is an LLM that takes real-world actions

No, it's saying "let's build a web service" and starting with a framework that just lets you write your endpoints. This is about something higher level than the nuts and bolts. Both are worth learning.

The fact you find this trivial is kind of the point that's being made. Some people think having an agent is some kind of voodoo, but it's really not.

An agent is more like a web service in your metaphor. Yes, building a web server is instructive, but almost nobody has a reason to do it instead of using an out of the box implementation once it’s time to build a production web service.

maybe more like “let’s write a web server but let’s use a library for the low level networking stack”. That can still teach you a lot.

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