Installation and setup

Every lesson runs in the browser panel with nothing installed. On your own machine, the SDK can run agents on OpenAI or, through LiteLLM, on a free Groq or Gemini key.

The browser panel

Press Run in the panel beside a lesson. The first run takes a few seconds while Python starts in your browser and the SDK downloads; after that it is instant. Nothing leaves the page, and no key is needed because the course uses a stand-in model you write in lesson 4.

pip install openai-agents 0.22

This course was checked with version 0.22.2.

pip install "openai-agents==0.22.2"

Running agents on a free modelOptional

Agents use OpenAI models by default, which read OPENAI_API_KEY from a paid account. For a provider with an OpenAI-compatible API, the SDK docs pass an AsyncOpenAI client with that provider's URL to OpenAIChatCompletionsModel. Traces upload to OpenAI, so without an OpenAI key turn tracing off with set_tracing_disabled, which lesson 23 explains; lesson 24 swaps in a real model.

import os

from agents import Agent, AsyncOpenAI, OpenAIChatCompletionsModel, set_tracing_disabled

set_tracing_disabled(True)
client = AsyncOpenAI(api_key=os.environ["GROQ_API_KEY"], base_url="https://api.groq.com/openai/v1")
agent = Agent(
    name="Support",
    instructions="Answer questions about orders.",
    model=OpenAIChatCompletionsModel(model="openai/gpt-oss-120b", openai_client=client),
)

export GROQ_API_KEY=gsk_...