Agent engineering primer: what an agent is, reduced to a loop, a model and tools

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This chapter of an AI engineering series strips away marketing language and defines an AI agent as a simple combination of a control loop, a language model, and a set of callable tools. It uses a fintech support-ticket triage prototype as the motivating case, where a basic script repeatedly returned a generic reply and never reached the escalation branch. The author presents setup requirements, including Python 3.11, specific library versions, and an OpenAI API key, and suggests verifying the environment first. A key technique shown is enforcing a contract on tool calls by validating arguments against JSON schemas before dispatch. The chapter then provides a minimal runnable agent that processes one ticket, choosing between replying and escalating before terminating.

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