AI Agents for Beginners is a course that teaches the fundamentals of building AI agents through a sequence of lessons. People learning generative AI and agent development use it to study topics and frameworks including AutoGen and Semantic Kernel. The catalogue entries provide skills, instructions, and an agent related to the course.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginnersWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners/agents-md/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners/agents-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.02487 | $0.02487 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00995 | $0.00995 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00497 | $0.00497 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00249 | $0.00249 |
Grade A, and why
ai-agents-for-beginners AGENTS.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 1mo ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 312 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
AGENTS.md
Project Overview
This repository contains "AI Agents for Beginners" - a comprehensive educational course teaching everything needed to build AI Agents. The course consists of 18 lessons (numbered 00-18) covering fundamentals, design patterns, frameworks, production deployment, local/on-device agents, and security of AI agents.
Key Technologies:
- Python 3.12+
- Jupyter Notebooks for interactive learning
- AI Frameworks: Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF)
- Azure AI Services: Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Foundry Agent Service V2
Architecture:
- Lesson-based structure (00-18 directories)
- Each lesson contains: README documentation, code samples (Jupyter notebooks), and images
- Multi-language support via automated translation system
- One Python notebook per lesson using Microsoft Agent Framework
Setup Commands
Prerequisites
- Python 3.12 or higher
- Azure subscription (for Microsoft Foundry)
- Azure CLI installed and authenticated (
az login)
Initial Setup
-
Clone or fork the repository:
gh repo fork microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners --clone # OR git clone https://github.com/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners.git cd ai-agents-for-beginners -
Create and activate Python virtual environment:
python3 -m venv venv source venv/bin/activate # On Windows: venv\Scripts\activate -
Install dependencies:
pip install -r requirements.txt -
Set up environment variables:
cp .env.example .env # Edit .env with your API keys and endpoints
Required Environment Variables
For Microsoft Foundry (Required):
AZURE_AI_PROJECT_ENDPOINT- Microsoft Foundry project endpointAZURE_AI_MODEL_DEPLOYMENT_NAME- Model deployment name (e.g., gpt-5-mini)
For Azure AI Search (Lesson 05 - RAG):
AZURE_SEARCH_SERVICE_ENDPOINT- Azure AI Search endpointAZURE_SEARCH_API_KEY- Azure AI Search API key
Authentication: Run az login before running notebooks (uses AzureCliCredential).
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 1mo ago Changed · -1 tokens per session 3d6cf8fa8196
- 1mo ago First seen · 312 lines · 2,488 tokens per session scan A 5ad43a376e15
ai-agents-for-beginners AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners (77,700 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 2,487 tokens to every session, about $0.0099 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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vscode buildNext.instructions.md
Working notes and architecture documentation for the new esbuild-based build system in build/next. Use when making changes to the new build pipeline (transpile/bundle commands, NLS plugin, source-map handling, resource copying, or self-hosting watch tasks).
next.js AGENTS.md
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