An autonomous AI system that perceives its environment, makes decisions, and takes actions to complete a goal. AI agents use LLMs as their reasoning engine and have access to tools (web search, code execution, APIs) to act on the world.
An AI agent differs from a simple chatbot by its ability to take multi-step actions autonomously. Given a goal like "research the top 5 competitors and write a summary report," an agent can break the task into subtasks, execute searches, process results, and produce the output.
Common agent patterns: ReAct (Reason + Act), plan-and-execute, and multi-agent (separate specialized agents for research, writing, and review). n8n AI agent nodes and LangGraph are the leading tools for building production agents.
Anthropic's AI assistant with industry-leading reasoning and safety
Open-source framework for building production LLM applications
Weekly AI tool reviews, news digests, and how-to guides.
Join 12,000+ builders