HN Reader

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...

Half a year has passed, and it feels like a long time in the field of AI. I read this article repeatedly a few months ago, but now I think the development of Agent has obviously reached a bottleneck. Even the latest gemini seems to have regressed.

> use simple, composable patterns

It's somehow incredibly reassuring that the "do one thing and do it well" maxim has held up over decades. Composability ftw.

They are so desperate that they start writing about LLM patterns now. Is an agentic LLM framework a Code Factory? Or perhaps a Code Factory Factory?

Or is it like a burrito (meme explanation of Monads when they were the latest hype)?

I hope that AI is something that brings people help

in case someone from anthropic is reading this: could you please add a bit of padding on the outside of the page? at least on a phone screen, the text covers the entire width of the screen from edge to edge

I like how this post avoids the hype and gets practical. Too often, people jump straight into building agent systems just because it's trendy, without asking if the task really needs it.

One of my favorite AI How-tos in the last year. Barry and Erik spend 80% of the post saying ~”eh, you probably don’t need agents. Just build straightforward deterministic workflows with if-statements instead.”

And then, when you actually do need agents, don’t over complicate it!

This post also introduced the concept of an Augmented LLM — a LLM hooked up to tools, memory, data — which is a useful abstraction for evolving LLM use beyond fancy autocomplete.

“An augmented LLM running in a loop” is the best definition of an agent I’ve heard so far.

When an AI agents completes a task, why not have the AI agent save the workflow used to accomplish that task so the next time it sees a similar input it feeds it to a predefined series of tools to avoid any LLM decision making in between tool calls?

And then eventually, with enough sample inputs, create simple functions that can recognize what tools should be used to process a type of input? And only fallback to an LLM agent if the input is novel?

It’s helpful but I think Anthropic should be offering non technical versions of this.

For example, a marketing group is interested in agents but needs a guide on how to spec them at a basic level.

There is a figure toward the end and an appendix that starts to drive at this.

Even though it’s new, “how to build them” is an implementation concern.

(December 2024, which somehow feels an eternity ago)

As someone who works for a company having a real Agent in production, (not a workflow), I cannot disagree more than the very first statement here: Use Agent Frameworks like Langraph. We did exactly that, and had to throw everything away just a month down the line. Then we built everything from scratch and now our system scales pretty well.

To be fair, I think there might be a space for using Agent Frameworks, but the Agent space is too early for a good enough framework to emerge. The semi contrarian though, which I hold to a certain extent, is that the Agent space is moving so fast that a good enough framework might NEVER emerge.

How do agents deal with task queueing, race conditions, and other issues arising from concurrency? I see lots of cool articles about building workflows of multiple agents - plus what feels like hand-waving around declaring an orchestrator agent to oversee the whole thing. And my mind goes to whether there needs to be some serious design considerations and clever glue code. Or does it all work automagically?

I used an n8n workflow I developed with one of the exact setups shown in the article. It costs me $3 and at least 3 minutes to get a response to a simple question. No thanks, I am sticking to normal search for the moment.

I think the Agent hype has come down now

This article is a good reminder to start with the simplest thing that works and only add complexity when it's truly needed.

A few clearly defined LLM calls with some light glue logic usually lead to something more stable, easier to debug, and much cheaper to run. The flashy, full-featured agents often end up causing more problems than they solve.

So an agent is just a monoid in the category of monads ?

> These frameworks make it easy to get started by simplifying standard low-level tasks like calling LLMs, defining and parsing tools, and chaining calls together. However, they often create extra layers of abstraction that can obscure the underlying prompts and responses, making them harder to debug. They can also make it tempting to add complexity when a simpler setup would suffice.

> We suggest that developers start by using LLM APIs directly

Best advice of the whole article by far.

It's insane that people use whole frameworks to send what is essentially an array of strings to a webservice.

We've removed LangChain and LangGraph from our project at work because they are literally worthless, just adding complexity and making you write MORE code than if you didn't use them because you have to deal with their whole boilerplate.

The entire discussion around agent orchestration, whether centralized or multi-agent, seems to miss the long-term economic reality. We're debating architectural patterns, but the real question is who pays for the agent's continuous existence.

Today, it's about API calls and compute. Tomorrow, for any truly autonomous, long-lived agent, it will be about a continuous "existence tax" levied by the platform owner. The orchestrator isn't just a technical component; it's a landlord.

The alternative isn't a more complex framework. It's a permissionless execution layer—a digital wilderness where an agent's survival depends on its own resources, not a platform's benevolence. The debate isn't about efficiency; it's about sovereignty.

Discussed at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42470541

Building Effective "Agents", 763 points, 124 comments