RESEARCH, WRITING, AND KNOWLEDGE AGENTS

LEARNING GOALS Some agents write code, and some click through screens. Others spend their time reading, thinking, and writing. In this chapter, you will learn about deep-research agents that gather and combine sources, document and report generation agents, and the citation and source-grounding rules that keep their work trustworthy. THE STUDENT WITH A TERM PAPER PICTURE Imagine a student assigned a big question for a term paper. A careless student writes confident-sounding paragraphs from memory, with no sources, and hopes nobody checks. A careful student breaks the big question into smaller questions, visits the library for each one, takes notes with page numbers, writes an outline, drafts the paper, and attaches a footnote to every important claim. A research and writing agent should behave like the careful student. The harness is the teacher's grading rubric, which insists on the outline, the notes, and the footnotes.