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Version: 2.0

Agents

Agents are autonomous systems that understand natural language and use tools and reasoning to accomplish tasks.

  1. Create an agent: Define the agent's name, description, and available tools.
  2. Write instructions: Create templates that guide the agent's behavior.
  3. Configure tools: Set up corpus access permissions and any external integrations.
  4. Test agents with sessions: Start conversations and iterate on your configuration.
Quick Start

To build your first agent, see the Agent quick start. Or, check out our Agents APIs.

Concepts​

The core concept to understand about agents is that their behavior is defined by instructions. The agent uses these instructions alongside information from a conversation session to determine how to respond to user input, including which tools to use.

These are the other core concepts when it comes to agents:

  • Tools: Tools provide agents with capabilities to interact with data and external systems.
  • Sessions: Sessions preserve context throughout a conversation so the agent can consider prior information when responding to a query.

Here's how to create a research assistant agent that can search the web for current information. This agent completes the following tasks:

  • Search the web when users ask questions requiring current information
  • Limit search results to 20 for comprehensive responses
  • Use a lower temperature (0.3) for more consistent, factual responses
  • Follow instructions to cite sources and admit uncertainty when appropriate
  • Configure retry logic to handle transient API failures gracefully

This example requires no corpus setup, making it perfect for immediate testing.

CREATE A RESEARCH ASSISTANT AGENT

Code example with bash syntax.
1?

To chat with your agent, read on about Sessions.