A Practical Guide to Building Agents
AI Summary
OpenAI's 34-page guide distilled from enterprise deployments: when an agent is actually warranted, single- versus multi-agent orchestration patterns, and guardrail design for safe deployment.
Original excerpt
OpenAI's contribution reads like the compliance-friendly counterpart to Anthropic's essays: a structured, PDF-shaped guide for teams that need to justify architecture decisions. Its strongest section is the first — when not to build an agent — echoing the field consensus that deterministic workflows should win wherever they suffice.
The orchestration chapter maps the single-agent-with-tools pattern against manager-worker and decentralized multi-agent patterns, with honest notes about the debugging cost each step up incurs. The guardrails chapter treats safety as layered defense: input filters, tool permission tiers, and human approval gates for consequential actions.
Included here for…
Frequently asked questions
What is "A Practical Guide to Building Agents" about?
OpenAI's 34-page guide distilled from enterprise deployments: when an agent is actually warranted, single- versus multi-agent orchestration patterns, and guardrail design for safe deployment.
Who wrote "A Practical Guide to Building Agents"?
"A Practical Guide to Building Agents" was written by OpenAI. It is curated in the Agentic Engineering vault on Burn 451, which covers engineering with ai coding agents.
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