A workshop that teaches you how to build your own coding agent. Similar to Roo code, Cline, Amp, Cursor, Windsurf or OpenCode.

🧠 Build Your Own Coding Agent via a Step-by-Step Workshop

Welcome! 👋 This workshop will guide you through building your own AI-powered coding assistant — starting from a basic chatbot, and adding powerful tools like file reading, shell command execution, and code searching.

You don’t need to be an AI expert. Just follow along and build step-by-step!

🌐 Want a detailed overview? Check out the blog post: ghuntley.com/agent

🎯 What You'll Learn

By the end of this workshop, you’ll understand how to:

• ✅ Connect to the Anthropic Claude API
• ✅ Build a simple AI chatbot
• ✅ Add tools like reading files, editing code, and running commands
• ✅ Handle tool requests and errors
• ✅ Build an agent that gets smarter with each step

🛠️ What We're Building

You’ll build 6 versions of a coding assistant.

Each version adds more features:

1. Basic Chat — talk to Cursor
2. File Reader — read code files
3. File Explorer — list files in folders
4. Command Runner — run shell commands
5. File Editor — modify files
6. Code Search — search your codebase with patterns

graph LR
    subgraph "Application Progression"
        A[chat.go<br/>Basic Chat] --> B[read.go<br/>+ File Reading]
        B --> C[list_files.go<br/>+ Directory Listing]
        C --> D[bash_tool.go<br/>+ Shell Commands]
        D --> E[edit_tool.go<br/>+ File Editing]
        E --> F[code_search_tool.go<br/>+ Code Search]
    end
    
    subgraph "Tool Capabilities"
        G[No Tools] --> H[read_file]
        H --> I[read_file<br/>list_files]
        I --> J[read_file<br/>list_files<br/>bash]
        J --> K[read_file<br/>list_files<br/>bash<br/>edit_file]
        K --> L[read_file<br/>list_files<br/>bash<br/>code_search]
    end
    
    A -.-> G
    B -.-> H
    C -.-> I
    D -.-> J
    E -.-> K
    F -.-> L

At the end, you’ll end up with a powerful local developer assistant!

🧱 How It Works (Architect