blog-building-effective-agents
Building effective agents
URL: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents Publisher: Anthropic Engineering Retrieved: 2026-07-08
Summary
Anthropic's engineering guide to building agents, drawn from working with many teams across industries. It draws a core line between workflows (LLMs and tools orchestrated through predefined code paths) and agents (LLMs that dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage), then catalogues the building block (the augmented LLM) and five composable workflow patterns plus autonomous agents. The throughline is to "find the simplest solution possible, and only increase complexity when needed," since agentic systems trade latency and cost for better task performance.