A practical guide to building agents
OpenAI's A Practical Guide to Building Agents is written for product and engineering teams building their first agents, distilled from "numerous customer deployments". It defines agents as "systems that independently accomplish tasks on your behalf" and suggests building one where a workflow involves complex decision-making, difficult-to-maintain rules or heavy reliance on unstructured data. An agent has "three core components": a model, tools and instructions. The guide covers orchestration, from a single agent to several working in a manager pattern or handing off to each other in a decentralized one, with examples in OpenAI's Agents SDK, and treats guardrails as "a layered defense", with a human brought in when an agent exceeds its failure thresholds or attempts a high-risk action. Its advice: "Start small, validate with real users, and grow capabilities over time."
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