Learn AI Curriculum Cookbook

Open-source autonomous agents 4 min

LLM APIs in 4 minutes

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — same shape, three vendors.

Every coding assistant, every agent, every custom tool you'd build talks to an LLM API. Three big vendors, plus aggregators. Same shape.

1

Get a key

One env var per provider. OPENAI_API_KEY · ANTHROPIC_API_KEY · GEMINI_API_KEY

2

Pick a model

Each vendor has fast / smart / cheap tiers. Pick by your task.

3

Send a message

One HTTP call → reply. That's the whole API.

The same call, three vendors

OpenAI

from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI()  # reads OPENAI_API_KEY

reply = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-5",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Say hello."}],
)
print(reply.choices[0].message.content)

Anthropic

from anthropic import Anthropic
client = Anthropic()  # reads ANTHROPIC_API_KEY

reply = client.messages.create(
    model="claude-sonnet-4-6",
    max_tokens=256,
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Say hello."}],
)
print(reply.content[0].text)

Google Gemini

from google import genai
client = genai.Client()  # reads GEMINI_API_KEY

reply = client.models.generate_content(
    model="gemini-3-pro",
    contents="Say hello.",
)
print(reply.text)

Or: one key, any model (OpenRouter)

OpenRouter proxies hundreds of models from every vendor behind a single OpenAI-compatible API. Useful when you want to A/B-test models, or when you don't want vendor lock-in.

from openai import OpenAI  # OpenAI-compatible
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1",
                api_key="sk-or-…")

reply = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",   # any model from any provider
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Say hello."}],
)

Where to get keys

VendorConsoleEnv var
OpenAIplatform.openai.comOPENAI_API_KEY
Anthropicconsole.anthropic.comANTHROPIC_API_KEY
Google Geminiaistudio.google.comGEMINI_API_KEY
Mistralconsole.mistral.aiMISTRAL_API_KEY
DeepSeekplatform.deepseek.comDEEPSEEK_API_KEY
OpenRouter (aggregator)openrouter.aiOPENROUTER_API_KEY
Prompt caching. When a tool sends the same context (system prompt, project files, history) repeatedly, most vendors can cache the input — drastically cheaper and faster. Good tools enable it automatically.