Building AI Agents Right: The Patterns Behind Effective Task Automation

As AI agents become increasingly prevalent in production systems, understanding the fundamental design patterns that drive them is essential for building efficient and reliable solutions. This guide provides concrete decision rules and code examples for selecting the minimal agentic architecture needed for each task, emphasizing that verification—feedback at each step—is what separates a true agent from a mere script, preventing the error compounding that undermines real-world applications.