The Building Blocks of Agentic Intelligence

Before the survey describes specific agentic RAG architectures, it lays out the ingredients those architectures are made from. This chapter covers two layers: the four core agentic patterns (what makes an agent "agentic" at all) and the five workflow patterns (how you wire agents together). Understanding these makes the taxonomy in Chapter 3 much easier, because every architecture there is just a particular combination of these pieces.