Agentic Design Patterns: A Hands-On Guide to Building Intelligent Systems by Antonio Gulli

Agentic Design Patterns: A Hands-On Guide to Building Intelligent Systems by Antonio Gulli

The central thesis of Agentic Design Patterns is that building an effective autonomous system requires structure and design, not just a more powerful foundation model. Gullí addresses an industry-wide frustration: while intermediate developers can easily orchestrate a basic single-call prompt or tool-calling loop, those scripts inevitably break down when exposed to chaotic, real-world data at scale. Without structural engineering patterns—like transaction safety, fallback logic, and intentional memory management—autonomous agents risk falling into endless execution loops, exhausting their token contexts, or generating unvetted database writes.

Gullí cures this architectural uncertainty by breaking down autonomous software design into 21 discrete, battle-tested patterns. To ground these theoretical principles, the book provides functional, hands-on code notebooks written across three premier execution environments: LangChain/LangGraph for handling complex state sequences, CrewAI for orchestrating multi-role collaboration networks, and Google’s Agent tooling. By demonstrating patterns uniformly across these distinct frameworks, Gullí teaches systems engineers how to separate abstract agentic logic from underlying code tools, allowing them to build resilient, self-correcting digital entities.