What is Agent State?
Agent state represents the complete snapshot of an AI agent's current situation at any given moment in time. It encompasses all the information the agent needs to continue its work, including its current goals, the context of the conversation or task, its working memory, the history of actions it has taken, and any intermediate results or data it has collected.
The state serves as the agent's "awareness" of where it is in its execution flow and what it knows at that point. This includes both short-term information like the current step in a multi-step plan and longer-term information like accumulated knowledge from previous interactions. Maintaining proper state is crucial for agents to operate coherently across multiple turns of interaction or steps in a complex task.
State management is a fundamental challenge in agent design. Stateful agents maintain and update their state across interactions, allowing them to build upon previous work and maintain coherence. The state must be carefully managed to ensure the agent doesn't lose critical information, doesn't become confused by stale or irrelevant data, and can efficiently access the information it needs for decision-making at each step of the agent loop.