Now live: Chapters 01–04 — Foundations, Agent Design Patterns, Memory & Tools, and Safety & Evaluation — are published with full prose, code examples, and diagrams. Ch 01 → Ch 02 → Ch 03 → Ch 04 →
sathishkumaralagiri.github.io / agentic-ai Vol. I · 2026 · CC BY 4.0

The Agentic AI
Reference Library

An open-source collection of practitioner guides covering the full stack of agentic AI — from foundations and design patterns to safety, evaluation, and production deployment.

6Categories
24Modules planned
16Live now
CC BYOpen license
01
Chapter — Live
Foundations

Core concepts and mental models for understanding agentic AI systems — perception loops, reasoning strategies, and an honest map of the frameworks available today. All four modules are now published with full prose, code examples, and diagrams.

Read Chapter 01 →
01.1
What is an AI Agent?
agentic-ai / agents-intro
Perception, reasoning, action loops. Agents vs assistants vs automation. The ReAct pattern explained from first principles.
Live
01.2
LLM Reasoning Patterns
agentic-ai / reasoning
Chain-of-thought, tree-of-thought, ReAct, reflection, self-consistency, and step-back prompting — when to use each.
Live
01.3
Agentic Landscape
agentic-ai / landscape
Overview of frameworks — LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, Claude, OpenAI Agents SDK. Honest trade-offs.
Live
01.4
Prompt Engineering for Agents
agentic-ai / prompting
System prompts, persona design, instruction hierarchy, few-shot examples, and structured output formatting.
Live
Chapter progress
4 / 4 modules live

“An agent is not just an LLM with tools — it is a system that perceives, decides, and acts in a loop, with the capacity to recover from failure.”

— agentic-ai / agents-intro
02
Chapter — Live
Agent Design Patterns

Architectural blueprints for building agents that are reliable, composable, and maintainable — from simple single-agent loops to complex multi-agent orchestration. All four modules are now published with full prose, code examples, and annotated diagrams.

Read Chapter 02 →
02.1
Single-Agent Loops
agentic-ai / single-agent
Plan-execute cycles, tool-calling loops, error recovery strategies, and step budget management.
Live
02.2
Multi-Agent Systems
agentic-ai / multi-agent
Orchestrator-worker, peer-to-peer, and supervisor patterns. Task delegation, message passing, and shared state management.
Live
02.3
Workflow Orchestration
agentic-ai / workflows
DAGs, sequential chains, parallel fan-out, conditional branching, and human-in-the-loop approval gates.
Live
02.4
Roles & Personas
agentic-ai / personas
Specialised agent roles — planner, critic, executor, summarizer. Role injection and persona stability techniques.
Live
Chapter progress
4 / 4 modules live
03
Chapter — Live
Memory & Tools

How agents remember, retrieve, and act on the world — covering every memory type from in-context buffers to vector databases, and tool use from function calls to browser automation. All four modules are now published with full prose, code examples, and diagrams.

Read Chapter 03 →
03.1
Memory Architectures
agentic-ai / memory
In-context, external (vector DB), episodic, semantic, and procedural memory patterns. Choosing the right type for your agent’s task.
Live
03.2
RAG & Retrieval
agentic-ai / rag
Naive RAG, advanced RAG, agentic RAG, re-ranking, hybrid search, and chunking strategies compared.
Live
03.3
Tool Use & Function Calling
agentic-ai / tool-use
Tool schemas, parallel tool calls, error handling, selection strategies, and MCP integration patterns.
Live
03.4
Browser & Computer Use
agentic-ai / computer-use
Web scraping, UI automation, screenshot grounding, and desktop agent patterns in practice.
Live
Chapter progress
4 / 4 modules live

“Memory is what separates a stateless chatbot from a true agent. Without it, every conversation starts from zero.”

— agentic-ai / memory
04
Chapter — Live
Safety & Evaluation

Trust, guardrails, and measuring whether your agent actually works — covering prompt injection defences, evaluation harnesses, tracing infrastructure, and responsible AI governance. All four modules are now published with full prose, code examples, and diagrams.

Read Chapter 04 →
04.1
Agent Safety & Guardrails
agentic-ai / safety
Prompt injection, jailbreaks, scope limits, action approval gates, and minimal-footprint principles.
Live
04.2
Evaluation Frameworks
agentic-ai / evals
Task success rate, trajectory evaluation, LLM-as-judge, GAIA benchmark, and building custom harnesses.
Live
04.3
Observability & Tracing
agentic-ai / observability
LangSmith, Langfuse, OpenTelemetry for agents. Span tracing, token tracking, and session replay.
Live
04.4
Responsible AI Practices
agentic-ai / responsible-ai
Bias, fairness, transparency, human oversight, and AI governance frameworks for agentic systems.
Live
Chapter progress
4 / 4 modules live

“An agent that cannot be evaluated cannot be trusted. Evals are not optional — they are the foundation of production readiness.”

— agentic-ai / evals
05
Chapter
Production & Ops
Deploying agents that hold up under real-world load — infrastructure patterns, cost management, security hardening, and enterprise compliance.
05.1
Agent Infrastructure
agentic-ai / infrastructure
Containerisation, queuing, async execution, state persistence, checkpointing, and retry logic.
Planned
05.2
Cost & Latency Optimisation
agentic-ai / cost-latency
Model routing, prompt caching, streaming, batching, and token budget management strategies.
Planned
05.3
Security for Agents
agentic-ai / security
Secrets management, sandboxing, least-privilege tool access, and supply chain risk mitigation.
Planned
05.4
Enterprise Deployment
agentic-ai / enterprise
Private deployments, compliance, audit logs, SLAs, and integrating agents with existing enterprise IT systems.
Planned
06
Chapter
Frontiers
The cutting edge of agentic AI research and practice — self-improvement, long-horizon reasoning, human-agent collaboration, and emerging inter-agent protocols.
06.1
Self-Improving Agents
agentic-ai / self-improvement
Reflection loops, fine-tuning from agent trajectories, RLHF for agents, and self-play strategies.
Planned
06.2
Long-Horizon Tasks
agentic-ai / long-horizon
Planning under uncertainty, task decomposition, context compaction, and mid-run checkpointing patterns.
Planned
06.3
Human-Agent Collaboration
agentic-ai / human-agent
Handoff protocols, trust calibration, explainability patterns, and feedback integration loops.
Planned
06.4
Agent-to-Agent Protocols
agentic-ai / a2a
Google A2A, MCP, agent marketplaces, and standardised inter-agent communication primitives.
Planned