Articles filed in category 'AI Agents'

  • Building Your Own AI Agent Middleware Platform Using OpenClaw

    By: Wei-Meng Lee

    Last updated: Friday, June 26, 2026

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2026 - July/August

    What if your AI assistant could read your email, search the web, and run scheduled tasks — all on hardware you own, with no cloud subscription? Wei-Meng's hands-on guide walks through building a fully operational personal AI agent using OpenClaw middleware, Ollama for model serving, Telegram as a messaging front-end, and Gmail for email access. You'll have a privacy-respecting, extensible agent platform running on a local macOS VM by the end.

  • Understanding AI Agents and Agentic AI: Concepts, Tools, and Implementation with SmolAgents

    By: Wei-Meng Lee

    Last updated: Friday, December 26, 2025

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2026 - January/February

    Wei-Meng Lee surveys the rise of agentic AI, shifting from passive prompt models to autonomous thinkers that reason, plan, and act using external tools. He introduces SmolAgents as a lightweight framework that lets LLMs orchestrate multi-step workflows, with two core types: CodeAgent for sandboxed Python code execution and ToolCallingAgent for API calls, web searches, and custom functions. Through practical examples and built-in vs. custom tools, Lee demonstrates how agents decompose complex tasks, combine data from various sources, and deliver cohesive, real-time insights, highlighting design choices for real-world applications.