AI Agents — Book 4 · The Research Agent

The first build, and the most learning per hour: a four-stage chain that plans queries, gathers with exact quotes, judges the strength of what it found, and writes a brief with a source on every claim. What makes it trustworthy is nothing clever — it is three instructions. Stop after eight searches. Never summarise from a search snippet. And "no clear answer" is a valid result rather than a failure. Built around a student whose first version made thirty-one searches and cited three pages it had never opened.