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Agents· 3 min

How do AI agents work?

Agents are LLMs that plan, call tools, observe results and loop until a goal is reached.

Key idea

An agent turns your goal into steps, uses tools (search, code, APIs), reads the outputs, and updates its plan — often for many iterations.

Example

A research agent given 'find 5 recent papers on RAG' searches the web, opens PDFs, extracts titles, and returns a formatted list.

What to remember

  • Core loop: think → act → observe → repeat
  • Reliability depends on tool design, memory and guardrails
  • Multi-agent systems split roles: planner, coder, critic