How AI Agents Work
A first-principles breakdown of how autonomous software agents plan, call tools, observe results, and iterate toward real-world goals.
Pieces in this series
How AI Agents Work
The architectural loop behind autonomous planning, tool execution, and stateful problem solving
An AI agent is not a sentient entity roaming the web. It is a deterministic software loop that pairs a language model with external tools, a working memory context, and an automated execution runtime.
How an AI Agent Decides Which Tool to Use
The mechanics of schema matching, token probabilities, and semantic tool routing
An AI model doesn't test tools or understand code like a human programmer. It converts tool definitions into structured text, calculates token probabilities, and emits the schema that best matches its trained pattern.
Why Neural Networks Were Invented
From McCulloch-Pitts threshold logic and the Rosenblatt perceptron to Minsky's XOR crisis and the backpropagation revolution
Early artificial intelligence relied on formal mathematical logic and handcrafted symbolic rules, but shattered against the messy ambiguity of perception. To recognize a face or hear a word, computing needed systems that learn from…
How Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) Aligns AI
From Bradley-Terry preference modeling and PPO reward hacking to KL divergence penalties and direct preference optimization
A pretrained language model only predicts the next statistical token. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) bridges the gap between text imitation and human intent using Bradley-Terry reward modeling and KL-constrained policy…
How AI Agent Memory Systems Work: From Working Context to Episodic Recall
From context window limits and virtual memory paging to vector recall, recursive summarization, and self-reflective memory consolidation
Large language models are fundamentally stateless functions with no inherent memory between sessions. Autonomous AI agents overcome this amnesia by implementing hierarchical memory architectures inspired by operating system virtual…