"We build our tools, and then our tools build us."
Compass, Goal-Seeking AI Agent
Part Overview
Part VI covers the complete landscape of agentic AI: from single-agent foundations through tool use and protocols, multi-agent orchestration, and specialized agents for code, browsers, and research. You will build agents that perceive, reason, and act autonomously; connect them to tools through standardized protocols (MCP, A2A); compose them into multi-agent teams; and design specialized agents for code generation, web automation, and data analysis. The part closes with a Tools of the Trade chapter on the agent stack (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, smolagents, PydanticAI).
Chapters: 5 (Chapters 26 through 30). These chapters draw on every preceding part and prepare you for the multimodal, evaluation, and production topics that follow. Agent safety and security gets its own dedicated treatment in Chapter 49 within Part X.
Moving beyond single-turn question answering, Part VI covers the rapidly evolving field of AI agents: systems that plan, use tools, collaborate with other agents, and take actions in the real world. This part connects everything you have learned so far into autonomous, production-ready systems.
- 26.1 What Makes an LLM an Agent (and What Doesn't)
- 26.2 Planning & Agentic Reasoning
- 26.3 Reasoning Models as Agent Backbones
- 26.4 Agent Evaluation & Benchmarks
- 26.5 End-to-End Agent System Architecture: A Deployment Blueprint
- 26.5a Agent Cost Control, Permissions, Recovery & End-to-End Wiring
- 26.6 Memory Architecture for Agents
- 27.1 Function Calling Across Providers
- 27.2 Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- 27.3 Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A)
- 27.4 Custom Tool Design: Validation, Error Handling & Security
- 27.5 Retrieval as a Tool Call
- 27.6 Efficient Multi-Tool Orchestration and Tool Economy
- 27.6a Tool Orchestration Patterns & Interpretability-Reasoning Lab
What's Next?
This part begins with Chapter 26: AI Agent Foundations. Each chapter builds on the previous one, so we recommend reading Part VI in order.