Your agent loop needs a budget, not a better prompt
Unbounded loops fail slowly and expensively. Treat steps, tokens, and time as product-level limits.
Agents
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Tools are an interface, not an API
Models choose tools from descriptions, not type signatures. Design tool surfaces the way you design onboarding.
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Agents
Chip Huyen's survey of agent architecture, planning, tool use, and the gaps between demos and production.
Why we recommend it The section on evaluation and failure modes is the part worth re-reading. It explains why agent demos look better than agent products, with the least hype of anything written that month.
Chip Huyen
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Building effective agents
Anthropic's taxonomy of agentic patterns, from prompt chaining to autonomous loops.
Why we recommend it Still the clearest map of the design space. It separates workflows from agents and gives each pattern a concrete failure mode, which most tooling marketing never does.
Anthropic Engineering