Agent Design Patterns: Run Four Control Flows and Their Failures
Run a fixed workflow, router, bounded tool loop and parallel join. Inspect which steps run, which stop and what evidence reaches the reviewer.
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Building, evaluating, and running AI agents: frameworks, development environments, memory, tools, MCP, Codex and Claude Code in practice.
Start with the three meanings of agent development environment: a coding product, an RL task system, or an execution runtime. Then inspect the RL environment projects or keep the short definition handy.
A focused reading order to help you choose your next step.
Separate the three meanings of agent development environment: coding-agent products, RL training environments and hosted execution runtimes.
A practical research-agent design: preserve sources, separate facts from inferences, and deliver a decision someone can review.
Learn what Model Context Protocol (MCP) is, how it works, and why it's the universal standard connecting AI agents to tools and data.
Step-by-step tutorial for building a multi-agent AI system from scratch using CrewAI, LangGraph, or AutoGen — with architecture patterns and production tips.
A 7-step engineer's guide to deploy AI agents production-ready in 2026: hosting, state, observability, evals, retries, cost controls, and rollouts.
Learn how to monitor and debug AI agents with traces, metrics, alerts, and replay evals. Stop guessing why your agent failed in production.
Build a small ticket-label agent in stages: define its boundaries, add retrieval and state, then test failure and recovery. Each lesson has an exercise and a concrete deliverable.
Download the local lab. The downloadable Python 3.10+ lab uses only the standard library and synthetic data. Run python3 agent_lab.py for eight boundary tests. It makes no network or model calls and does not establish production readiness.
Send a request, parse its response and test API failures.
Verify a delivery before accepting its work.
Write three prompts with explicit output contracts.
Separate a model proposal from an authorized action.
Run an MCP server and client; discover and test a tool.
Filter retrieval by access and test insufficient evidence.
Scope and expire remembered facts.
Bound a plan and stop when a dependency fails.
Bind approval to the exact proposed change.
Run a dataset and preserve failures in explicit scoring denominators.
Reproduce a local evaluation and compare tools on the same task.
Run four control flows and inspect their failure behavior.
Audit the hidden assumptions in a starter.
Review a constrained coding change against behavior.
Make one small app change with a testable contract.
Import and execute a ticket-triage workflow with failure fixtures.
Connect signed delivery, retrieval and approval; verify restart and replay.
Run a fixed workflow, router, bounded tool loop and parallel join. Inspect which steps run, which stop and what evidence reaches the reviewer.
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Compare a Python agent backend, a LangGraph chat UI and a full-stack chatbot, then reproduce a pinned starter inspection without paid inference.
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Reproduce a local Pydantic Evals run, then compare Promptfoo, LangSmith, Braintrust and plain Python against the same dataset and scoring rules.
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Make a Claude Messages API request in Python, validate its JSON response, and test authentication, rate limits and bad output with local fixtures.
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Run ten ticket cases through two deterministic baselines, inspect wrong labels and timeouts, and retain failures in a reproducible evaluation report.
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Run a SQLite approval lifecycle that rejects changed, stale, expired and revoked proposals, then returns a completed local receipt on retry.
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Run a four-step ticket workflow with validated dependencies, a dispatch budget, cancellation and traces of failed prerequisites.
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Run a SQLite preference store with owner scoping, versioned updates, provenance, expiry and deletion, then verify it from fresh Python processes.
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Run a six-document retrieval and answer pipeline, inspect citations, exclude private and outdated evidence, and measure an intentional synonym failure.
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Run a versioned Python MCP server and client, discover a ticket-label tool, and test valid calls, schema failures and protocol errors.
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Run a Python tool-calling loop with schemas, argument checks, matched results, turn limits and ten deterministic success and failure fixtures.
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Build one local ticket-review flow in Cursor, then verify proposal, approval, stale rejection and retry behavior through the UI and real HTTP checks.
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Use Copilot in VS Code on a small SQLite bug, starting with two failing tests and reviewing the exact version check in the resulting patch.
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Run a local Python webhook receiver, verify signed bytes, persist event receipts, and test duplicate delivery, tampering and worker rollback.
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Build classification, grounded-answer and change-proposal prompts with explicit outputs, twelve fixtures, and a runnable Python evaluator.
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Compare five RL environment and task-generation projects for coding agents, with primary sources, selection criteria and a CSV export.
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Connect a real HTTP receiver to retrieval, proposal validation and a stored approval, then verify twelve local failure and recovery scenarios.
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Reactive vs proactive AI agents explained: architecture, triggers, planning loops, risks, examples, and when to use each pattern.
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A practical research-agent design: preserve sources, separate facts from inferences, and deliver a decision someone can review.
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Separate the three meanings of agent development environment: coding-agent products, RL training environments and hosted execution runtimes.
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Compare five enterprise agent deployment options by identity, state, integration and operations, then run a pilot with explicit acceptance criteria.
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A source-based shortlist of Datalab, ABBYY, Rossum, Google, and Azure, with practical questions about extraction, review, and deployment.
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Compare Glean, Guru, Notion and Microsoft knowledge search through connector permissions, freshness, answer evidence and a concrete customer pilot.
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Learn how to monitor and debug AI agents with traces, metrics, alerts, and replay evals. Stop guessing why your agent failed in production.
Published · Updated
A 7-step engineer's guide to deploy AI agents production-ready in 2026: hosting, state, observability, evals, retries, cost controls, and rollouts.
Published · Updated
Learn what Model Context Protocol (MCP) is, how it works, and why it's the universal standard connecting AI agents to tools and data.
Published · Updated
Step-by-step tutorial for building a multi-agent AI system from scratch using CrewAI, LangGraph, or AutoGen — with architecture patterns and production tips.
Published · Updated