Intro to LLMs and pipelines

This repo contains support notebooks for topics used or covered in the first module. Notebooks in this repo are marimo notebooks: plain, git-diffable .py files with reactive cells, run either through the marimo UI or locally via uv.

Notebooks

• prompting.py: prompting basics through one running example, turning requests into GitHub search queries: message roles, temperature, few-shot, chain-of-thought, structured output and validation, and handling ambiguous requests.
• litellm_intro.py: one function call, run against several providers through the course's LiteLLM proxy.
• model_zoo.py: the proxy's full model catalog, plus a live test drive of a subset of it.
• raw_api_layer.py: Chat Completions vs the Responses API through the same proxy, and an intro on how tool calling works.

Access

The notebooks call models through a LiteLLM proxy that we host for the course. Participants get a proxy URL and a personal API key when they enroll, and those go into .env as OPENAI_BASE_URL and OPENAI_API_KEY. Without them, the notebooks won't run as-is.

If you're not enrolled, you can run your own LiteLLM proxy with your own provider keys. For the notebooks to work unchanged, the proxy needs:

• An OpenAI pass-through route, with OPENAI_BASE_URL pointing at it and ending in /openai. The notebooks strip that suffix to reach the proxy's main endpoint.
• The model names the notebooks use, configured under the same names. Otherwise, change the model names in the notebooks to whatever your proxy serves.

Usage

Option 1: Docker

Create the .env file from a template:

cp .env.template .env

Build and start the container:

docker compose up -d

Access the marimo editor at: http://localhost:8888

Stop the container:

docker compose down

The notebooks/ folder is mounted as a volume, so any changes you make in the marimo UI are reflected locally and vice versa.

If you want to add packages, edit pyproject.toml (or run uv add <package>), then rebuild:

docker compose up -d --build

Option 2: Local with uv

cp .env.template .env
uv sync
uv run marimo edit notebooks/