Guide

Building effective agents

Anthropic · anthropic.com

The clearest primary definition: workflows run on predefined code paths, agents let the model direct its own process and tools, and simple beats complex.

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It answers 5 questions

  1. What actually is an AI agent, in plain language?
  2. What's the difference between automation (Zapier, n8n, Make) and AI agents?
  3. Why would a founder use agents instead of a chatbot or automation?
  4. What are the highest-ROI automations a startup should build first?
  5. Should I put an AI agent in my product, or is a simple workflow enough?

Read with it

  1. Video AI Agents, Clearly Explained Jeff Su
  2. IBM's plain-language guide to how agents plan, use tools and remember, with business examples. ibm.com Guide AI agents IBM
  3. Lays out the six behaviors that separate a real agent from an ordinary AI tool. lennysnewsletter.com Podcast Make product management fun again with AI agents Lenny's Podcast (Hamza Farooq, Jaya Rajwani)
  4. OpenAI's guide to what an agent is (model, tools, instructions), when one is worth building, and the guardrails it needs. cdn.openai.com Guide A practical guide to building agents (PDF) OpenAI
  5. Video What's next for AI agentic workflows Sequoia Capital / Andrew Ng
  6. The thread that made agentic the word of the year, with the reasoning attached. x.com Thread Andrew Ng: agentic workflows will drive massive AI progress Andrew Ng
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