Initial reading notes: 'Agentic Design Patterns'
Antonio Gullí has written Agentic Design Patterns, which is also floating around as a .pdf.
Violating my usual policy of not recording notes until I'm done reading (it's long, and perhaps not the sort of book best read cover-to-cover):
- The very idea that there are agentic design patterns, which we can reason and talk about and employ where appropriate, is useful. They overlap with traditional design patterns, as we would have expected.
- In traditional usage, "design pattern" is a loose term that covers a heterogeneous mix of techniques. (So, for example, the "strangler fig" technique for migrating software has often been thought of as a design pattern, but this sort of migration technique is different from other kinds of patterns.) Here also, "design pattern" seems not to mean much other than "abstractable software-building technique." (That's not a criticism.)
- This is a very early effort and, from what I've read so far, is best understood as a guided tour from an expert. It is certainly not a fleshed-out textbook. So, for example, the chapter on evaluation and monitoring has many useful ideas, and I'll refer back to it often, but I'd have to do a lot of independent planning before I could use it to actually implement an evaluation subsystem of an agentic system.
- Several times, I felt a sort of relief in seeing that the recommended techniques were usual nuts and bolts of software applied in a new context: lists representing chained actions, task management with priorities handled with standard Python techniques, and so on. It's no surprise that a small sequential group of things is still best represented with a list, but seeing even toy examples helps develop one's intuition for how agentic systems will be similar to and dissimilar from other systems.
- Some parts should soon be outdated,1 but I'm willing to bet (with my time and effort) that studying this book will do one more good than harm.
- Reading this feels a bit like seeing new articles and books as cloud computing really moved into the mainstream. Interacting with remote APIs became a first-class software subject: similar to other API interactions in some ways; different in other ways; new, but not magic. I'm grateful to Gullí for helping me get intellectually acclimated in the new world.
...not that I know which ones they are.↩