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Building Effective "Agents"

(www.anthropic.com)
597 points jascha_eng | 2 comments | 20 Dec 24 12:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.401s | source
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jascha_eng ◴[20 Dec 24 12:31 UTC] No.42470556[source]▶
I put the agents in quotes because anthropic actually talks more about what they call "workflows". And imo this is where the real value of LLMs currently lies, workflow automation.

They also say that using LangChain and other frameworks is mostly unnecessary and does more harm than good. They instead argue to use some simple patterns, directly on the API level. Not dis-similar to the old-school Gang of Four software engineering patterns.

Really like this post as a guidance for how to actually build useful tools with LLMs. Keep it simple, stupid.

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1. Philpax ◴[20 Dec 24 22:15 UTC] No.42475610[source]▶
Aren't you editorialising by doing so?
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2. jascha_eng ◴[20 Dec 24 22:29 UTC] No.42475730[source]▶
I guess a little. I really liked the read though, it put in words what I couldn't and I was curious if others felt the same.

However the post was posted here yesterday and didn't really have a lot of traction. I thought this was partially because of the term agentic, which the community seems a bit fatigued by. So I put it in quotes to highlight that Anthropic themselves deems it a little vague and hopefully spark more interest. I don't think it messes with their message too much?

Honestly it didn't matter anyways, without second chance pooling this post would have been lost again (so thanks Daniel!)