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.
Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx agentmods add skills/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners/testing-course-samplesnpx skills add microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners --skill testing-course-samplesgit 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/skills/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners/testing-course-samples)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners/testing-course-samples"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners/testing-course-samples.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" 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 | $0.00086 | $0.01116 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00043 | $0.00558 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00017 | $0.00223 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00112 |
Grade A, and why
testing-course-samples 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 5d 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 — 80 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Testing the Course Samples
Validate that the lesson notebooks and code samples run against a live
Microsoft Foundry / Azure OpenAI setup. The repo ships a runner at
scripts/validate-notebooks.ps1 that
executes every Python notebook headlessly and prints a PASS/FAIL matrix.
When to use
- "Validate all the notebooks / samples against my Azure subscription."
- "Smoke-test the course after upgrading packages or changing models."
- "Which lessons still pass / fail live?"
Do not use this for the AI Smoke Test GitHub Action (that validates deployed
hosted agents — see tests/README.md). This skill
runs the notebooks locally.
Prerequisites (check first)
- Python 3.12+ with course deps:
python -m pip install -r requirements.txtplus the executor:python -m pip install nbconvert ipykernel. .envat the repo root (copy from.env.example) with at least:AZURE_AI_PROJECT_ENDPOINT— Foundry project endpoint (https://<account>.services.ai.azure.com/api/projects/<project>)AZURE_AI_MODEL_DEPLOYMENT_NAME— a non-deprecated deployment (e.g.gpt-5-mini)AZURE_OPENAI_ENDPOINT(https://<account>.openai.azure.com) andAZURE_OPENAI_DEPLOYMENTfor lessons that call Azure OpenAI directly (Lesson 06, 02-azure-openai, 14 handoff/human-loop).
az logincompleted — samples authenticate withAzureCliCredential(Entra ID, keyless).- Verify the model deployment exists:
az cognitiveservices account deployment list -g <rg> -n <account> -o table.
Running the validation
# All Python notebooks (skips .NET, .venv, site-packages, translations, skill assets)
pwsh scripts/validate-notebooks.ps1
# A single lesson, with a longer per-cell timeout
pwsh scripts/validate-notebooks.ps1 -Filter '08-*' -Timeout 600
# Just list what would run (no execution)
pwsh scripts/validate-notebooks.ps1 -List
# Explicit interpreter (if `python` is not on PATH, e.g. Windows Store alias)
pwsh scripts/validate-notebooks.ps1 -Python "C:/path/to/python.exe"
The script writes executed copies, per-notebook logs, and results.json to
$env:TEMP\aiab-nbval and exits with the number of failures.
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.
- 5d ago First seen · 80 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A 838ef21b9163
testing-course-samples is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners (73,847 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 1,116 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
prompt-writing
Create, refine, and optimize high-quality YAML prompts for AI assistants. Use when working with prompt templates, system prompts, agent prompts, or any prompt engineering tasks. Provides structure guidelines, template patterns, and quality standards for YAML-based prompts.
skill-creator
Guide for creating effective skills. This skill should be used when users want to create a new skill (or update an existing skill) that extends Claude's capabilities with specialized knowledge, workflows, or tool integrations.
agent-release-manager
Agent skill for release-manager - invoke with $agent-release-manager.
agent-release-swarm
Agent skill for release-swarm - invoke with $agent-release-swarm.
skill-reviewer
Reviews DeerFlow skill packages for readiness, triggers, safety boundaries, resources, and evidence. Invoke when users ask to audit, grade, or production-check an existing skill.
agent-pagerank-analyzer
Agent skill for pagerank-analyzer - invoke with $agent-pagerank-analyzer.