Autonomous Systems

Introduction The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has turned prompt engineering into a mainstream practice. Early‑stage developers often treat an LLM as a sophisticated autocomplete engine: feed it a carefully crafted prompt, receive a text response, and then act on that output. While this “prompt‑then‑act” loop works for simple question‑answering or single‑turn tasks, it quickly breaks down when we ask an LLM to operate autonomously—to plan, execute, and adapt over many interaction cycles without human supervision. ...

Introduction “AI agents” are everywhere in current discourse: customer support agents, coding agents, research agents, planning agents. But the term is often used loosely, sometimes referring to: A single large language model (LLM) call A script that calls a model and then an API A complex system that plans, acts, remembers, and adapts over time To design, evaluate, or improve AI agents, you need a clear mental model of what an agent actually is and how its parts work together. ...