Beginner to Hero: Agentic AI with OpenAI: full course guide
Build an OpenAI agent that does real work: the tool-calling loop, function schemas and structured outputs, testing trajectories without burning tokens, evaluating task success and cost, and deploying with budgets, tracing and a kill switch.
Beginner to Advanced · read it in your browser with Skiiling Pro.
Loading the reader…
What is inside this guide
01Getting Set Up with OpenAI
- What an Agent Is, and When a Single Model Call Is Enough
- The Request Loop and Tool Calling, From First Principles
- Keys, Clients, Configuration and a Reproducible Project Layout
- Choosing Your Level: Raw API, the Agents SDK, or a Framework
- Your First Tool-Calling Agent, End to End
02The Development Framework
- Function and Tool Schemas as Contracts, Including Errors
- Instructions, Role Hierarchy and Steering Behaviour
- Conversation State, Context Windows and What to Carry Forward
- Structured Outputs and Validation at the Boundary
- Handoffs, Multi-Agent Patterns and When One Agent Is Enough
03The Testing Framework
- Testing the Deterministic Majority Without Calling the Model
- Faking the Model: Fixtures, Replay and Why Recordings Rot
- Asserting on a Trajectory, Not Just the Final Message
- Fault Injection: Stalls, Truncation, Duplicates and Bad Tool Output
- Testing Guardrails and Prompt-Injection Resistance
04The Evaluation Framework
- Task Success, Step Efficiency and Cost per Completed Task
- Building a Benchmark From Your Own Traffic
- Trajectory Evaluation Versus Final-Answer Evaluation
- Model-Graded Evaluation, and Auditing the Grader
- Regression Gates and Running Evaluation Continuously
05The Deployment Framework
- Versioning the Prompt, Model, Tools and Permissions as One Unit
- Serving Shape: Streaming, Timeouts, Retries and Backpressure
- Staged Rollout, Kill Switches and Reversible Releases
- Tracing an Agent Run, and What Must Never Be Logged
- Cost, Caching and Degrading Gracefully When the API Is Slow
How to read it
The reader above opens the complete guide in your browser. The contents panel on the left is built from the guide's own bookmarks, so every module and topic is one click away. You can search the full text, zoom, and highlight passages in four colours; highlights and your reading position are remembered on this device.
Reading the guides is part of Skiiling Pro, the one web subscription that also unlocks Role Prep and Practical Labs and Skill Plans. The syllabus above is free to browse. See pricing.