Onboarding: Your First Steps ⛵

Now that you have all the details, let’s get started! We’re going to do four things:

Create your Hugging Face Account if it’s not already done
Sign up to Discord and introduce yourself (don’t be shy 🤗)
Follow the Hugging Face Agents Course on the Hub
Spread the word about the course

Step 1: Create Your Hugging Face Account

(If you haven’t already) create a Hugging Face account here.

Step 2: Join Our Discord Community

👉🏻 Join our discord server here.

When you join, remember to introduce yourself in #introduce-yourself.

We have multiple AI Agent-related channels:

agents-course-announcements: for the latest course information.
🎓-agents-course-general: for general discussions and chitchat.
agents-course-questions: to ask questions and help your classmates.
agents-course-showcase: to show your best agents.

In addition you can check:

smolagents: for discussion and support with the library.

If this is your first time using Discord, we wrote a Discord 101 to get the best practices. Check the next section.

Step 3: Follow the Hugging Face Agent Course Organization

Stay up to date with the latest course materials, updates, and announcements by following the Hugging Face Agents Course Organization.

👉 Go here and click on follow.

Step 4: Spread the word about the course

Help us make this course more visible! There are two way you can help us:

Show your support by ⭐ the course’s repository.

Share Your Learning Journey: Let others know you’re taking this course! We’ve prepared an illustration you can use in your social media posts

You can download the image by clicking 👉 here

Step 5: Running Models Locally with Ollama (In case you run into Credit limits)

Install Ollama

Follow the official Instructions here.
Pull a model Locally

    ollama pull qwen2:7b #Check out ollama website for more models

Start Ollama in the background (In one terminal)

    ollama serve

Use LiteLLMModel Instead of HfApiModel

    from smolagents import LiteLLMModel

    model = LiteLLMModel(
        model_id="ollama_chat/qwen2.5:7b",  # Or try other Ollama-supported models
        api_base="http://127.0.0.1:11434",  # Default Ollama local server
        num_ctx=8192,
    )

Why this works?

Ollama serves models locally using an OpenAI-compatible API at http://localhost:11434.
LiteLLMModel is built to communicate with any model that supports the OpenAI chat/completion API format.
This means you can simply swap out HfApiModel for LiteLLMModel no other code changes required. It’s a seamless, plug-and-play solution.

Congratulations! 🎉 You’ve completed the onboarding process! You’re now ready to start learning about AI Agents. Have fun!

Keep Learning, stay awesome 🤗

< > Update on GitHub