Agentic Design Patterns

Agentic design patterns are the recurring structures teams reuse when building agent systems, much as design patterns describe recurring solutions in code.

The ones named most often are reflection, where an agent critiques and revises its own output, tool use, planning, where a goal is broken into steps, and multi-agent collaboration. Naming them is useful because each fails in its own way: a planning failure looks nothing like a bad tool call, and the two are worth measuring separately.

Closely related concepts include Multi-Agent System, Sybil Attack (Multi-Agent), Agent Framework, Planning Loop. Each is defined in the Prefactor glossary.