Anatomy of the AI agent

Core Agent Model
The building blocks The core components of an AI agent and when the agent loop is worth the overhead.
The System Prompt & Context Engineering System prompts and assembled context as reliable agent behavior at runtime.
Structured Output & Constrained Decoding Reliable agent outputs with schemas, constrained decoding, and validation.
The ReAct pattern The loop that turns a stateless model into an agent that reasons, acts, and observes.
Planning & Task Decomposition Turning broad goals into concrete plans, subtasks, and executable steps.
Tools & Function Calling Exposing functions to models, validate arguments, and keeping tools use reliable.
Tool Servers & MCP Discovering and calling tools across process boundaries using external tool servers and MCP.
Memory & Context Engineering Conversation history management, retrieval, and context-window budgets across turns.
RAG as an Agent Pattern Retrieval augmentation as an agent pattern for grounded, iterative information use.
Personalization, User Models & Preference Learning Building evidence-backed user models that adapt agent behavior with scope, consent, transparency, and control.
Execution and Control Flow
Workflow Orchestration Prompt chains, routing, parallelization, workers, and evaluators.
State Machines & Hybrid Control Flow Combining deterministic state transitions with flexible agent reasoning.
Sequential & Parallel Patterns Deterministic multi-agent pipelines sequence, fan out, vote, and merge agent work.
Agent Composition & Reusable Primitives Building composable agents with reusable orchestration primitives.
Model Selection & Routing Balancing latency, cost, capability, and confidence.
Loop, Review-and-Critique & Iterative Refinement Improving agent output through explicit review and feedback.
Dynamic Agent Orchestration Discovering, selecting, and coordinating agent capabilities at runtime.
Long-Running & Durable Agents Persisting progress, suspend, resume, and survival of long-running workflows.
Temporal Reasoning & Scheduling Building agents that reason about time, deadlines, and deferred work.
Multi-Agent Architectures
Multi-Agent Systems Specialized agents with separate roles and tools.
Agent-to-Agent Communication Discover, message, stream, and delegate work to other agents across system boundaries.
Coordinator & Hierarchical Patterns Dynamic work delegation to specialists and results synthesis.
The Swarm Pattern Peer agents collaborating, critique, and hand off work without a central coordinator.
Collaborative State & Conflict Resolution Coordinating shared state safely across concurrent agent systems.
Agent Economics & Marketplace Design Modeling agent costs, pricing, incentives, and marketplace dynamics.
Advanced Reasoning and Adaptation
Reasoning Beyond ReAct Reasoning strategies that extend ReAct with branching, voting, and reflection.
Knowledge Graphs & Structured Reasoning Query, traverse, and reason using graphs.
Retrieval-Augmented Actions Retrieving successful trajectories to guide agent actions.
Fine-Tuning & Distillation for Agents Fine-tuning and distillation of agent behavior for faster, cheaper, and more consistent results.
Self-Improving Agents & Tool Creation Learning from runs, refine prompts, and create tools safely.
Simulation & Synthetic Environments Testing agents safely, repeatedly, and at scale.
Specialized Agent Types
Coding Agents Files, tests, terminals, and deterministic feedback.
Computer-Use Agents Operating graphical software through screenshots, clicks, keystrokes, and visual feedback.
Multimodal Agents Agent reasoning across text, images, audio, video, and structured media inside one loop.
Agentic Search & Deep Research Iterative search, triangulating sources, and synthesizing cited answers.
Data Agents & SQL Generation Natural-language database access through safe text-to-SQL agent design.
Voice and Real-Time Conversational Agents Low-latency speech agents built around streaming audio and turn-taking.
Edge & On-Device Agents Local agent design under privacy, latency, connectivity, and hardware constraints.
Platform, Integration, and Operations
Agent Frameworks - Build vs. Buy Trade-offs between agent frameworks and custom orchestration.
Embedding Agents in Existing Systems Integrating agent capabilities into established applications and infrastructure.
Streaming, Speculative Execution & Latency Engineering Reducing real and perceived latency in multi-step agent systems.
Error Handling & Recovery Failures classification, retry safely, fall back, checkpoint, and recover.
Observability & Testing Traces, metrics, evaluations, and regression tests as a measure of agents behavior.
Benchmarking & Evaluation Design Evidence about quality, regressions, and real-world readiness.
Cost Optimization Compounding agent costs across loops.
Agent UX & Transparency Trustworthy agent interfaces.
Agent Lifecycle Management Versioning, testing, deployment and monitoring in composite systems.
Safety, Trust, and Governance
Guardrails & Safety Runtime checks constraints and side effects beyond prompt instructions.
Human-in-the-Loop Review, approval, correction, and escalation on risky actions.
Agent Authorization, Delegation & Consent Carrying user authority safely through agents, sub-agents, tools, approvals, and external systems.
Trust Calibration & Selective Abstention Calibrating agent confidence.
Agent Identity & Persona Stability Maintaining consistent agent behavior across long-running interactions.
Security Model reasoning as untrusted process containing damage with layered controls around actions.
Agents in Adversarial Environments Defending agents against manipulation, injection, and adaptive attacks.
Compliance, Audit Trails & Regulated Agents Regulated domains with compliance controls, explainability, and audit trails.
Federated & Privacy-Preserving Agents Designing agents that respect privacy, residency, and data boundaries.
Putting It Together
Putting It Together A production reference architecture connecting agent reasoning, tools, state, trust, operations, and governance.