Agent engineering: smolagents

This is the sixth take on the same news reader. Previous versions used tool-calling agents. This time I used smolagents from HuggingFace, specifically its CodeAgent. Instead of calling predefined tools, the agent writes Python code and executes it in a sandbox.

How CodeAgent works

A CodeAgent follows a ReAct loop: think, act, observe, repeat. At each step, the LLM generates a Python snippet, the framework executes it, and stdout plus the return value feed back as the next observation. To finish, the agent calls final_answer(value).