Agentic literature is the youngest in this book. Everything below is from 2023 or later, and the field is changing fast enough that the canonical references shift every six months.
30.6.1 Foundational essays and papers
- Anthropic, "Building Effective Agents" (2024): short, opinionated, and very influential.
- Anthropic Engineering blog: posts on Claude Code, Claude Skills, Computer Use, and MCP from the team building them. Primary source for 2024-25 agent best practices.
- Lilian Weng, "LLM Powered Autonomous Agents" (2023): the canonical survey.
- Yao et al., "ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting" (2023): the ReAct paper.
- Wu et al., "AutoGen" (2023): multi-agent conversation framework.
- Wang et al., "Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agents" (CodeAct, 2024).
- 2024 paper "MMAU: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Massive Multitask Agent Understanding" (Yin et al.): multi-task agent evaluation companion to GAIA-2.
- Cognition's "Devin" technical posts and SWE-bench leaderboard analyses: first-hand commentary on long-running agent failure modes.
- All Hands AI (OpenHands) blog and benchmark posts: the open-platform counterpart to Devin.
- 2025 "Agent S2" and "Computer Use Agents are not yet reliable" (community follow-ups, 2025): needed for honest anti-hype calibration on browser / computer-use agents.
- smol.ai's AI Engineer Summit 2024/2025 talks on YouTube: the deepest practitioner content on building production agents.
30.6.2 Active blogs and newsletters
- Latent Space: podcast and newsletter; the agent-engineering community's central venue.
- Eugene Yan: production-quality writing on RAG and agents.
- Simon Willison's Weblog: daily commentary; agent-specific tag.
- LangChain blog: weekly LangGraph case studies.
30.6.3 Communities
- LangChain Discord (linked from langchain.com), AutoGen Discord (linked from the GitHub).
- Anthropic Discord: MCP working group.
- r/AI_Agents.
30.6.4 Comparing the venues
Table 30.6.1: 30.6.1 Where to go for what (Part VI).
| Venue | Use case | Latency |
|---|---|---|
| arXiv cs.AI / cs.CL | Primary research | Days |
| Latent Space | Practitioner interviews | Weekly |
| LangChain blog | Recipe case studies | Weekly |
| Simon Willison | Daily commentary | Daily |
| r/AI_Agents | Real-world failure modes | Hours |
Tip: Read code, not posts
Agentic patterns are still being shaken out. The most reliable signal is what frontier products (Cursor, Claude Code, Devin) actually do, not what blog posts say they do. Read their public traces and replay logs when available.
What's Next?
This chapter completes the current part. The next part, Part VII: Retrieval & Information Extraction with LLMs, opens a new arc; see the part index for chapter ordering.
Further Reading
Practitioner Guides
Anthropic (2024). "Building Effective Agents." anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents. Reference practitioner guide on agent design patterns.
OpenAI (2024). "A Practical Guide to Building Agents." openai.com/index/practical-guide-to-building-agents. Reference industry guide on agent product design.