AI Agents for Beginners: Microsoft's Official Intro Course to AI Agents

Microsoft has turned its own agent-building curriculum into an open-source course, “AI Agents for Beginners,” and put it on GitHub for anyone to work through. Every lesson pairs a written explainer with runnable code samples, and the first 13 lessons also come with short video walkthroughs. The course breaks down everything you need to build AI agents into 18 lessons, laying out a full path from concepts to production. GitHubDaily recommended the course back in February 2025, when it was still 10 lessons; it has since grown to 18, spanning everything from the basics to production deployment and security.

Core features

• A structured curriculum: 18 lessons walk through agent fundamentals, frameworks and design patterns, production deployment, local agents, and security, in order. Each lesson stands on its own, so you can jump in anywhere.
• Dedicated design-pattern lessons: core patterns like tool use, planning, multi-agent systems, agentic RAG, and metacognition each get their own lesson.
• Runnable code with every lesson: examples ship as Python notebooks built on the Microsoft Agent Framework and Microsoft Foundry — fork the repo and run or modify them directly; some examples also support .NET (requires the .NET 10 SDK or later).
• Translations into 50-plus languages: generated and kept up to date automatically via Co-op Translator, including Simplified Chinese.
• Video and community support: the first 13 lessons include short YouTube videos, and there’s a Discord channel and developer forum for questions.

Typical use cases

• Developers with a Python background who want to systematically fill in gaps around agent concepts, frameworks, and design patterns, lesson by lesson.
• Forking the repo and working through the notebook examples one by one, tweaking the code to build your own agent prototype.
• Using it as internal training or workshop material — the course setup page even includes shallow-clone advice specifically for workshops.

Quick start

# Sparse checkout to skip the 50+ translation directories and reduce size
git clone --filter=blob:none --sparse https://github.com/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners.git
pip install -r requirements.txt   # requires Python 3.12+

After that, run az login to sign in to Azure, copy .env.example to .env, and fill in your Foundry project’s endpoint and model deployment name (e.g. gpt-5-mini). That’s enough to run most of the lesson examples.

Summary

This course suits developers who want to learn AI agent development from scratch; if you’ve never touched generative AI before, the official recommendation is to first work through the companion course, Generative AI for Beginners. The project is MIT-licensed and actively maintained, and as a free course its coverage and update cadence both hold up well. A few things to keep in mind: running the examples requires an Azure subscription and a Microsoft Foundry project — most lessons can authenticate key-free via az login, though a few lessons and optional integrations still need an API key configured; the full repo is roughly 3GB, so a sparse checkout is recommended; and the Chinese translation is machine-generated, so a handful of terms may drift from the English original.