The no-nonsense approach to AI agent development

What this post added

This post outlines a practical, step-by-step methodology for developing AI agents, focusing on a 'no-nonsense' approach. It advocates for starting with manual simulation of the agent's task to identify repetitive steps, followed by automating the core loop using a combination of plain code for deterministic operations and LLMs for tasks requiring judgment. The post emphasizes refining prompts, making tool calls precise, and replacing model calls with deterministic functions where possible to optimize for reliability. It also introduces the concept of using a second model to critique the output of the first for further refinement. The core message is that building effective AI agents leverages fundamental software engineering principles.