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Building Effective AI Agents

anthropic.com

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Re: Building Effective AI Agents

#3

Post by simonw »

This article remains one of the better pieces on this topic, especially since it clearly defines which definition of "AI agents" they are using at the start! They use: "systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks".

I also like the way they distinguish between "agents" and "workflows", and describe a bunch of useful workflow patterns.

I published some notes on that article when it first came out: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/20/building-effective-age...

A more recent article from Anthropic is https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/built-multi-agent-rese... - "How we built our multi-agent research system". I found this one fascinating, I wrote up a bunch of notes on it here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/14/multi-agent-research-s...

Re: Building Effective AI Agents

#4

Post by gregorymichael »

One of my favorite AI How-tos in the last year. Barry and Erik spend 80% of the post saying ~”eh, you probably don’t need agents. Just build straightforward deterministic workflows with if-statements instead.”

And then, when you actually do need agents, don’t over complicate it!

This post also introduced the concept of an Augmented LLM — a LLM hooked up to tools, memory, data — which is a useful abstraction for evolving LLM use beyond fancy autocomplete.

“An augmented LLM running in a loop” is the best definition of an agent I’ve heard so far.

Re: Building Effective AI Agents

#5

Post by juddlyon »

simonw wrote: post #3

This article remains one of the better pieces on this topic, especially since it clearly defines which definition of "AI agents" they are using at the start! They use: "systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks". I also like the way they distinguish between "agents" and "workflows", and describe a bunch of useful workflow patterns. I p…

Thank you for the extra notes, this is top of mind for me.

Re: Building Effective AI Agents

#7

Post by nahsra »

spenczar5 wrote: post #2

(December 2024, which somehow feels an eternity ago)

Yes, but it's held up really well in my opinion! I use this piece constantly as a reference and I don't feel it's aged. It reframed Anthropic as "the practical partner" in the development of AI tools.

Re: Building Effective AI Agents

#10

Post by AvAn12 »

How do agents deal with task queueing, race conditions, and other issues arising from concurrency? I see lots of cool articles about building workflows of multiple agents - plus what feels like hand-waving around declaring an orchestrator agent to oversee the whole thing. And my mind goes to whether there needs to be some serious design considerations and clever glue code. Or does it all work automagically?
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