Free PDF — Production Reference

Agent Engineering Patterns

2026 Edition · Patterns That Survive Production

Every production agent pattern in one place. Planning loops, tool design, memory, control flow, failure recovery, multi-agent coordination, evaluation. From simple ReAct to complex hierarchies — with code.

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Control Flow Patterns ReAct, Plan-and-Execute, Reflexion, Tree-of-Thoughts, AutoGen. When to use each, with diagrams.
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Tool Design That Scales JSON schema, error handling, idempotency, side-effect isolation. The contract LLMs can actually keep.
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Memory Architectures Short-term, long-term, episodic, semantic. When you need each, how they combine, eviction strategies.
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Failure Recovery Retry, backoff, circuit-break, fallback paths, human-in-the-loop. Patterns from real production incidents.

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What's Inside

Planning & Control

  • ReAct, Plan-Execute, Reflexion compared
  • When to use single-agent vs multi-agent
  • Termination conditions (and infinite loops)
  • Token budgets and step ceilings

Tools

  • JSON schema design for reliable tool calls
  • Idempotency, side-effects, and undo
  • Error messages that LLMs can recover from
  • Tool selection at scale (100+ tools)

Memory

  • Working memory: state, scratchpad, intermediate results
  • Long-term: vector store integration
  • Episodic memory and conversation summarization
  • When to forget — eviction patterns

Operate

  • Evaluation: trajectories, outcomes, costs
  • Observability: tracing, replay, debugging
  • Safety: tool allowlists, output validation, audit
  • Cost ceilings and runaway detection