§ Recipe

Build an AI agent from scratch.

Most agent tutorials are toys. A real agent has memory, tool use, guardrails, and observability. This is the stack that survives week two, not just the launch tweet.

Serious scale
  1. Reasoning engine

    01

    Anthropic API

    Claude API access for long-context reasoning, coding, tools, and enterprise-safe AI apps.

    LLM Providers & APIs
    Paid
    4.8

    Claude's tool-calling and long-context behavior is the most reliable substrate for agents that need to reason over documents and invoke tools in sequence without going off the rails.

  2. Orchestration framework

    02

    LangChain

    The most popular framework for building LLM applications — chains, agents, and RAG made easy.

    AI Agents
    Open source
    4.4

    Batteries-included patterns for chains, memory, retries, and tool routing. You'll outgrow it — but it saves six weeks of scaffolding you don't want to write.

  3. RAG layer

    03

    LlamaIndex

    Data framework and managed services for RAG, agents, document parsing, and knowledge apps.

    AI Agents
    Freemium
    4.3

    If your agent needs to know your data, LlamaIndex is the fastest path from documents to a production retrieval pipeline. Better defaults than rolling your own.

  4. Tool access

    04

    Composio

    MCP gateway and integration layer connecting agents to 1,000+ toolkits with managed auth.

    MCP & Skills Platforms
    Freemium
    4.2

    Instead of writing OAuth flows for every third-party integration, Composio gives your agent 200+ pre-wired tools. You go from GitHub-Slack-Notion in a day.

  5. Multi-agent coordination

    05

    CrewAI

    Multi-agent framework and platform for orchestrating role-based AI crews.

    AI Agents
    Open source
    4.3

    When one agent isn't enough. CrewAI's role-based coordination beats hand-rolled message passing when you need researcher-plus-writer-plus-reviewer workflows.

  6. Inference for sub-tasks

    06

    Groq

    Ultra-fast LLM inference for chat, agents, audio, and open model workloads.

    LLM Providers & APIs
    Freemium
    4.5

    For the low-stakes reasoning inside the loop — classification, routing, summarization — Groq's LPU inference is 10x cheaper and 5x faster than frontier model calls. Use it everywhere it's good enough.