Everyone's talking about AI agents, but most tutorials start with heavyweight frameworks, API keys, and 500+ lines of boilerplate.

What if you could build a functional AI agent in just 60 lines of pure Python?

No LangChain. No CrewAI. No framework at all.

Let's do it.

What We're Building

A simple AI agent that can:

Take a goal as input

Break it into subtasks

Execute each subtask using tools

Return a final result

Think of it as the minimal viable agent — the skeleton you can extend into anything.

The Architecture

Our agent follows the classic Observe → Think → Act loop:

┌─────────────┐ │ USER GOAL │ └──────┬──────┘ │ ▼ ┌──────────────┐ │ THINK (LLM) │◄──────┐ └──────┬───────┘ │ │ │ ▼ │ ┌──────────────┐ │ │ ACT (Tool) │───────┘ └──────┬───────┘ │ ▼ ┌──────────────┐ │ RESULT │ └──────────────┘

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The Code (60 Lines)

import json import os from anthropic import Anthropic

client = Anthropic ()

# Define tools the agent can use tools = [ { " name " : "…