12 Employing agents

What do you think of when you hear the word "agent"?

The first thing that comes to mind for many is a secret agent, someone like James Bond who undertakes dangerous missions to protect national and global security. Or maybe you think of a real estate agent, someone who helps homeowners buy and sell property. There are also gate agents at the airport who assist travelers as they are jetting off to various destinations. And then there are insurance agents, talent agents, customs agents, literary agents, and countless other kinds of agents.

Clearly, there are several kinds of agents and there is no one definitive definition of what an agent is or does. But the one thing that is common among all of these agents is that they all do something. They all have a job that they are specialized in and their mission is to apply their training and skills to achieve their specific goals.

12.1 Understanding agents

12.2 Implementing agentic workflows and patterns

12.2.1 Chaining prompts

12.2.2 Routing tasks

12.2.3 Applying parallelization

12.3 Creating self-planning agentic solutions

12.3.1 Initializing an Embabel project

12.3.2 Defining the agent class

12.3.3 Defining an action to get game rules

12.3.4 Defining an action to get the rules filename

12.3.5 Defining an action to get the game title

12.3.6 Running the agent via Embabel’s shell

12.3.7 Accessing the agent via MCP

12.4 Summary