The 14 Pillars of Agentic AI
Production agents are not one giant prompt — they are systems built from a handful of repeatable patterns. Pick a pillar, flip between the naïve and the pattern approach, and press play to watch why it wins. Every diagram is animated and every stat is the real trade-off the pattern buys you.
1Parallel Tool Use
The problem
The bottleneck in agents is rarely the model thinking — it is waiting on networks, databases and APIs. Calling independent tools one after another wastes that wait time.
The pattern
When the agent plans several independent tool calls, fire them all at once. Total time collapses to the slowest single call instead of the sum of all of them.
- Independent calls have no reason to run sequentially.
- Wall-clock time ≈ the single slowest call, not the sum.
- The gain grows with the number of tools.
In the wild: A trading assistant fetches price + news + filings simultaneously.
Want to build these yourself? Head to the hands-on projects for runnable Python + JavaScript implementations of prompting, embeddings, tools, RAG, agentic RAG and multi-agent teams.