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Building Effective AI Agents

(www.anthropic.com)
543 points Anon84 | 1 comments | 17 Jun 25 17:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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simonw ◴[17 Jun 25 18:59 UTC] No.44302601[source]▶
This article remains one of the better pieces on this topic, especially since it clearly defines which definition of "AI agents" they are using at the start! They use: "systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks".

I also like the way they distinguish between "agents" and "workflows", and describe a bunch of useful workflow patterns.

I published some notes on that article when it first came out: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/20/building-effective-age...

A more recent article from Anthropic is https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/built-multi-agent-rese... - "How we built our multi-agent research system". I found this one fascinating, I wrote up a bunch of notes on it here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/14/multi-agent-research-s...

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koakuma-chan ◴[17 Jun 25 21:53 UTC] No.44304356[source]▶
Does anyone know which AI agent framework Anthropic uses? It doesn't seem like they ever released one of their own.
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1. ankit219 ◴[18 Jun 25 00:34 UTC] No.44305508[source]▶
From what it looks like, it's one main LLM (you are sending query to - orchestrator) which calls other LLMs via tool calls. The tools are capable of calling llms too, and can have specific instructions, but mostly just the orchestrator deciding what they should be researching on, and assigns them specific subqueries. There is a limited depth / levels of search queries too, you should see the prompt they use[1]

One cool example of this in action is seen when you use claude code and ask it to search something. In a verbose setting, it calls an MCP tool to help with search. The tool returns summary of the results with the relevant links (not the raw search result text). A similar method, albeit more robust, is used when Claude is doing deep research as well.

[1]: https://github.com/anthropics/anthropic-cookbook/blob/main/p...