How to Build Agentic AI[Agents]

Building on Anthropic AI’s “Building effective agents” to understand the best practices for building Agentic Systems (at this stage).

Hey everybody! My friend

Devansh

has been building and researching on AI for a long time and writes one of the biggest AI publications in the world: Artificial Intelligence Made Simple.

I asked him to write a newsletter for us about how to build agents and he was kind enought to do it!

Enjoy :)

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Hey, it’s Devansh 👋👋

A lot of us are very excited about the future of Agentic AI. Agents is a series dedicated to exploring the research around Agents to facilitate the discussions that will create the new generation of Language Models/AI Systems. If you have any insights on Agents, reach out, since we need all the high-quality information we can get.

I put a lot of effort into creating work that is informative, useful, and independent from undue influence. If you’d like to support my writing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter. Doing so helps me put more effort into writing/research, reach more people, and supports my crippling chocolate milk addiction. Help me democratize the most important ideas in AI Research and Engineering to over 200K readers weekly. Many companies have a learning budget that you can expense this newsletter to. You can use the following for an email template to request reimbursement for your subscription.

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Recently, I came across Anthropic AI’s publication, “Building effective agents”. It summarizes their experience with building agents- both internally (with themselves) and externally (working with people). In this article, I want to build on their findings to communicate the best practices for building agentic systems. The aim is to build a timeless, first-principles guideline for building Agentic AI. To do so, I will combine my own research and reading with the hundreds (not an exaggeration) of conversations I’ve had with various people exploring the space in various capacities.

For this article, I would especially like to thank-

1. My coworkers at SVAM International, which has a very strong process automation and AI Agents Division, for sharing their insights/experiences with me. SVAM has been in the space for almost a decade (and in software solutions for more than 30 years), so hearing about their experiences helped me filter the lower and higher-impact research/techniques.

2. The team at IQIDIS, a leading Legal AI company built by lawyers for lawyers (I’m helping them build out their AI). IQIDIS leverages agents fairly extensively to help lawyers do the substantive work faster, and they’ve agreed to let me share some insights in how they accomplish this in this and future pieces (if you’re interested in the work- email info@iqidis.ai or fill out this short contact form)

I’m always looking for more collaborators, so please reach out either through my social media links (later in the article) or my email (devansh@svam.com) to talk. Our cult can provide the most actionable insights only because I can learn from all of you, and I’m deeply appreciative to all of you who take the time to talk to me.

As always, before we get into the technical details of this piece, here is my analysis of Agentic AI, from various perspectives. I would especially direct your attention to the Investor and Policy Maker sections(a reminder- please use a big screen for the best reading experience)-

Let me know how you think we should address the possible inequality gap.