Developer Builds Ecommerce AI Support Agent From Scratch, Skipping LangChain

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A developer built a functional ecommerce AI support agent using TypeScript and Anthropic's Claude API without relying on the popular LangChain framework, aiming to understand AI agents at the code level. The core of the agent is a while loop that sends messages to the language model, checks for tool-call responses, executes the requested tools, and feeds results back until Claude returns plain text. The agent can handle product searches, order status lookups, refund queries, and support ticket creation by autonomously deciding which tools to invoke. The project uses a tool registry pattern, meaning new capabilities can be added without modifying the agent loop itself. The developer notes that standard design patterns such as Strategy, Factory, and Repository emerged naturally from structuring the code cleanly, rather than being deliberately imposed.

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