A practical guide to building agents
A practical guide to building agents is a 2025 guide from OpenAI. Its core idea: an agent is a model, tools, and instructions, wrapped in guardrails.
Key ideas
- 01Suggests agents where rules-based automation struggles: complex judgment calls, hard-to-maintain rule sets, or heavy unstructured data.
- 02Defines an agent as model, tools and instructions; start with a single agent and add multi-agent patterns only when needed.
- 03Layered guardrails and human intervention for high-risk or failing actions are essential; customers succeed with an incremental approach.
What it means for you Draft
For executives at $10–100M companies
Read the 'when should you build an agent' section before approving any agent project; it is a good filter against automating what simple rules already handle. The orchestration and code sections are for whoever builds it, not the leader.
Limitations
Medium trust.Grounded in deployments, but vendor-authored and oriented to OpenAI's own SDK.
About the publisher: Makes ChatGPT; studies its own customers.
OpenAI. "A practical guide to building agents." April 2025. https://openai.com/business/guides-and-resources/a-practical-guide-to-building-ai-agents/
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