Building Effective Agents
AI Summary
Anthropic's December 2024 post that named the discipline. Distinguishes 'workflows' (LLMs orchestrated through predefined code paths) from 'agents' (LLMs dynamically directing their own tool use), then catalogs the composable patterns that actually ship: prompt chaining, routing, parallelization, orchestrator-workers, evaluator-optimizer. The thesis — simple composable patterns beat heavyweight frameworks — has become the founding citation for nearly every harness-design discussion since. Required reading before you reach for LangChain, LangGraph, or any other orchestration library.
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