2025-05-08 Stanford CE guest lecture

AI Agents:

The future of work and innovation

What are we talking about?

• What is LlamaIndex
• Agent Patterns in LlamaIndex
  • Chaining
  • Routing
  • Parallelization
  • Orchestrator-Workers
  • Evaluator-Optimizer
• Hands-on coding
  • Building an agent in LlamaIndex
  • Implementing patterns in LlamaIndex
  • Building a multi-agent system

What is LlamaIndex?

Python: docs.llamaindex.ai

TypeScript: ts.llamaindex.ai

LlamaCloud

cloud.llamaindex.ai

LlamaHub

llamahub.ai

Why LlamaIndex?

• Build faster
• Skip the boilerplate
• Avoid early pitfalls
• Get best practices for free
• Go from prototype to production

What can you build in LlamaIndex?

• Lots of stuff! Especially...
• AI agents
• RAG

What is an agent?

Semi-autonomous software

that uses tools to accomplish a goal

Agentic programming is a new paradigm

When does an agent make sense?

When your data is messy, which is most of the time

LLMs are good at turning lots of text into less text

LLMs work well under the hood

You don't have to build a chatbot

LLMs need data

The solution is RAG

RAG = infinite context

Agents need RAG

and RAG needs agents

Building Effective Agents

anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents

• Chaining
• Routing
• Parallelization
• Orchestrator-Workers
• Evaluator-Optimizer

Chaining

Routing

Parallelization

Sectioning

Parallelization: flavor 1

Voting

Parallelization: flavor 2

Orchestrator-Workers

Evaluator-Optimizer

aka Self-reflection

Arbitrary complexity

Workbook time!

bit.ly/ai-agents-workbook

What's next?

bit.ly/llamaindex-discord

Thanks!

Follow me on BlueSky:

@seldo.com

bit.ly/ai-agents-future