Agent Design Patterns

AI agents are showing up everywhere—and most of them are being built by trial and error. Agent Design Patterns distills the experience of a growing community of agent builders into 20+ composable, reusable patterns for building AI agents that are reliable, efficient, controllable, and easy to reason about. In this uniquely-valuable book, author and NVIDIA Research scientist Peter Belcak gives you a durable engineering vocabulary and design intuition that outlasts any new model release.

Each pattern included here is production-tested, and designed to click together as you construct transparent, testable, deployment-ready agentic applications. You’ll appreciate the familiar presentation style, with a simple template of a named problem, a clear solution, benefits, drawbacks, popular variants, and rules for composition with other patterns. Informative diagrams, worked examples, and Belcak’s clear mathematician-turned-engineer voice make even the most subtle patterns easy to internalize.

By the end, you’ll be able to read an underperforming agent, pinpoint the exact quality that is lacking, and reach for the specific pattern that addresses it. You’ll lower per-run costs without redesigning your agent, and even build self-improving agents that auto-tune their own prompts.