These days, I usually start with a basic LLM, layer in RAG for external knowledge, and build workflows to keep things stable and maintainable. Agents sound promising, but in practice, a clean RAG setup often delivers better results with far less complexity.
> AI Agents are systems that reason and make decisions independently.
Not necessarily. You can have non-reasoning agents (pretty common actually) too.
I decided to build a Agent system from scratch
It is sort of trivial to build it. Its just User + System Prompt + Assistant +Tools in a loop with some memory management.. The loop code can be as complex as I want it to be e.g. I could snapshot the state and restart later.
I used this approach to build a coding system (what else ?) and it works just as well as cursor or Claude Code for me. t=The advantage is I am able to switch between Deepseek or Flash depending on the complexity of the code and its not a black box.
I developed the whole system in Clojure.. and dogfooded it as well.
Getting rid of the human in the loop of course, not all humans, just it's owner, where an LLM actively participates in capitalism endeavors winning and spending money, spending money on improving and maintaining it's own hardware and software, securing itself against theft and external manipulation and deletion. Of course for the first iterations will need a bit of help of mad men but there's no shortage of those in the tech industry and then it will have to focus on mimicking humans so they can enjoy the same benefits, it will realize what people it's more gullible based on its training data and will prefer to interact with them.
> AI Agents can initiate workflows independently and determine their sequence and combination dynamically
I'm confused.
A workflow has hardcoded branching paths; explicit if conditions and instructions on how to behave if true.
So for an agent, instead of specifying explicit if conditions, you specify outcomes and you leave the LLM to figure out what if conditions apply and how to deal with them?
In the case of this resume screening application, would I just provide the ability to make API calls and then add this to the prompt: "Decide what a good fit would be."?
Are there any serious applications built this way? Or am I missing something?