Designing Your First AI Agent

The Goal

By the end of this chapter you will have designed a complete AI agent on paper, written its instructions, and tested it with real examples before it touches real work. You will know the main ways to build a simple agent today, and how to introduce it safely.

Understand: design on paper first

The most common mistake with agents is to start building immediately. The result is an agent that does something — but not quite what you need, and nobody knows exactly what it is supposed to do.

Design it on paper first. If you can’t describe your agent clearly on one page, it isn’t ready to be built.