Playbooks

Building Effective Agents

Anthropic's engineering essay on agent architectures — workflows versus agents, five composable patterns, and why simple beats clever.

  • Free
  • Maintained by Anthropic
Open resourceanthropic.com · opens in a new tab

Why it matters

The most-cited piece on agent design, and its core argument is one marketing engineers need: use the simplest pattern that works. The prompt-chaining and routing patterns map directly onto content pipelines and lead triage.

What to try

Sketch one of your marketing workflows as a prompt chain with a quality gate between steps — the essay's first pattern.

Tagged under

  • AI agents

Related resources

Items that share a category with this one.

  • A Practical Guide to Building Agents

    Free

    OpenAI's plain-language guide to designing agent systems — single versus multi-agent architectures, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop patterns.

    • AI agents
    • Marketing automation

  • Anthropic Cookbook

    Open source

    Anthropic's open-source recipe collection — runnable notebooks for tool use, retrieval, subagents, and automation patterns.

    • AI agents

  • Activepieces

    Open source

    Open-source automation platform whose 280+ integrations double as MCP tools — agents call the same pieces your workflows use.

    • Marketing automation
    • AI agents