ARCHIVED · NOVEMBER 2025
November 2025
The Agentic Design Library as published in November 2025 — preserved exactly as it appeared on the homepage that month. Reading list of 9 essay-style pieces.
One Useful Thing
November 20, 2025
On Working with Wizards
Ethan Mollick
The shift from co-intelligence (back-and-forth prompting) to delegated work — the new era of giving agents a task and reviewing the result. From partner to audience, collaboration to conjuring.
philosophyco-intelligenceOne Useful Thing
November 18, 2025
Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3
Ethan Mollick
Mollick's retrospective on three years of frontier model progress. From chatbots to agents — what changed, what didn't, and what the gradient of capability looks like up close.
retrospectivefrontier modelsLatent Space
November 15, 2025
Agent Engineering
swyx + Alessio Fanelli
Hub post on agent engineering as a field — what real production agent labs look like, how infrastructure and architecture decisions play out across companies building agentic products.
industryinfrastructureMIT Sloan
November 4, 2025
Agentic AI, Explained
MIT Sloan
MIT Sloan's primer on agentic AI for managers and operators. What it is, what it isn't, and how to evaluate vendors making agent claims.
primeroperationsOne Useful Thing
September 29, 2025
Real AI Agents and Real Work
Ethan Mollick
What real AI agents look like in the wild. Concrete examples — comparison shopping, monitoring construction sites — and what separates novelty from operational value.
case studyagentsoperationalarXiv
May 15, 2025
AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual Taxonomy, Applications and Challenges
Peer-reviewed taxonomy
Disambiguates AI agents from agentic AI systems. Useful framework for operators trying to evaluate competing vendor claims about what their product actually does.
researchtaxonomyLil'Log
May 1, 2025
Why We Think
Lilian Weng
On test-time compute and reasoning in LLMs. Process reward models, beam search optimization, and why smaller models with better inference can dominate larger ones on certain tasks.
reasoningtest-time computeAnthropic
December 19, 2024
Building Effective AI Agents
Anthropic Research
Research-page companion to the engineering essay. Surveys the broader landscape of agent design choices and where simple patterns succeed against complex frameworks.
design patternsresearchLil'Log
June 23, 2023
LLM Powered Autonomous Agents
Lilian Weng
The foundational essay on agent architecture. Decomposes the LLM-as-brain pattern into planning, memory, and tool use. Still the most cited single piece on the topic.
foundationalarchitecture