An agent is not one thing. It's a model, a set of tools it can call, a way to decide what to do next, a memory of what has happened so far, and the checks that stop it going off the rails. Take any one of those away and you have a chatbot with ambitions.

In this workshop we build an agent from those pieces, in TypeScript, with Google's Agent Development Kit and Gemini. We add each part in turn: typed tools the model can use, instructions that shape how it reasons, state that carries across steps, routing to hand work off to a specialist agent, parallel steps that merge their results, and a human checkpoint for the decisions you'd rather approve yourself. By the end you'll know what each piece does and why the agent falls over without it.