Build Better AI Agents: 5 Developer Tips from the Agent Bake-Off- Google Developers Blog

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This post details 5 key developer tips for building production-grade AI agents, derived from the Google Cloud AI Agent Bake-Off. It emphasizes moving beyond simple prompt engineering to rigorous 'agentic engineering'. Key takeaways include: 1. Architecting for multi-agent workflows by decomposing problems into specialized sub-agents managed by a supervisor agent, similar to microservices. 2. Building agent harnesses with a mindset of impermanence, expecting them to be replaced by advancements in state-of-the-art models. 3. Treating multimodality as a core requirement, not an add-on, by natively integrating multimodal models for richer context ingestion and generation. 4. Leveraging open source protocols like MCP, A2A, UCP, AP2, A2UI, and AG-UI for dynamic resource discovery and communication, reducing the need for custom integration code. 5. Using deterministic code (e.g., Python functions, SQL queries) for execution after LLMs perform reasoning and intent extraction, with strict JSON validation schemas to capture and validate model outputs.