Building Your First Automation with AI Agents

Start with one tool

The simplest useful agent connects a model to exactly one external tool — a search API, a calendar, a spreadsheet — and lets the model decide when to call it, rather than trying to orchestrate a dozen integrations on day one.

Add state carefully

Once the single-tool loop works reliably, introduce short-term memory (the current task's context) before long-term memory (persisted facts across sessions) — most automation failures come from over-engineering memory before the basic loop is solid.

Design for failure

Every real automation needs explicit handling for the tool call that fails, times out, or returns something unexpected — that's where the actual engineering effort goes, far more than in prompt-writing.