Agent
AI/dictionary/agents
Definition
A system that uses a model to decide its own next action instead of just answering in one shot: it can call tools, read the result, and decide what to do next, looping until the task is done or it gives up.
Posts that use this term
- Observability: what a production AI system actually logs
Closing the AI Engineering series. Tracing prompts and tool calls, tracking spend and latency, and catching failures that don't throw an error.
- Multi-agent systems: orchestration and handoffs
Adding a second agent doesn't halve your problems, it multiplies them. Supervisor patterns, handoffs, and the real cost of splitting one agent into several.
- Agent memory: scratchpad vs long-term store
An agent forgets everything the moment its context window ends, unless something is built to save it. Short-term scratchpad vs a real long-term store, and what's actually worth keeping.
- The agent loop: plan, act, observe
Most agent failures look the same: stuck calling the same tool forever. The plan-act-observe loop, why it gets stuck, and the fixes that actually work.
- From running models to building systems
Running a model and building with one are different skills. This post opens the AI Engineering series and lays out why the next nine posts exist.