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Our own agents with their own tools. | Irrational Exuberance

lethain.com · 1,185 words · saved by 1 readers

Entering 2025, I decided to spend some time exploring the topic of agents. I started reading Anthropic’s Building effective agents, followed by Chip Huyen’s AI Engineering. I kicked off a major workstream at work on using agents, and I also decided to do a personal experiment of sorts. This is a general commentary on building that project. What I wanted to build was a simple chat interface where I could write prompts, select models, and have the model use tools as appropriate. My side goal was to build this using Cursor and generally avoid writing code directly as much as possible, but I found that generally slower than writing code in emacs while relying on 4o-mini to provide working examples to pull from.

Entering 2025, I decided to spend some time exploring the topic of agents. I started reading Anthropic's Building effective agents , followed by Chip Huyen's AI Engineering . I kicked off a major workstream at work on using agents, and I also decided to do a personal experiment of sorts. This is a general commentary on building that project. What I wanted to build was a simple chat interface where I could write prompts, select models, and have the model use tools as appropriate. My side goal was to build this using Cursor and generally avoid writing code directly as much as possible, but I fou

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