Agentic Patterns

Multiple AI companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Amazon) have independently converged on the same agentic system design patterns, driven by shared technical constraints like finite context windows and the need for tool protocols. The article outlines eight foundational postulates for production agentic systems—including persistent instruction files, external safety enforcement, context budgeting, and MCP-based tools—and provides role-specific guidance for developers, platform engineers, and infrastructure teams implementing these systems. Successful adoption requires incremental complexity growth starting with instruction files and gradually adding hooks, tools, and multi-agent capabilities rather than building monolithic systems at once.