AI Engineering/Phase 14/Lesson 16

OpenAI Agents SDK: Handoffs, Guardrails, Tracing

OpenAI Agents SDK is the lightweight multi-agent framework built on the Responses API. Five primitives: Agent, Handoff, Guardrail, Session, Tracing. Handoffs are tools named `transfer_to_<agent>`. Guardrails trip on input or output. Tracing is on by default.

Learn + Build 1.3 hr Python (stdlib)

Prerequisites: Phase 14 · 01 (Agent Loop), Phase 14 · 06 (Tool Use)

#Learning Objectives

Name the five primitives of the OpenAI Agents SDK.
Explain handoffs: why they are modeled as tools, what name shape the model sees, and how context transfers.
Distinguish input guardrails, output guardrails, and tool guardrails; explain run_in_parallel vs blocking mode.
Implement a stdlib runtime with handoffs + guardrails + span-style tracing.

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The text and code of this lesson are based on AI Engineering from Scratch by Rohit Ghumare, MIT licensed.