Devman

Composing a Boutique Agent

A guide to building custom agents with our platform.

8 min read

Introduction

Building a Boutique agent means creating an AI assistant that's uniquely yours. This guide walks you through the process step by step, from selecting components to deploying a production-ready agent.

Step 1: Define Your Use Case

Start by clearly defining what your agent should accomplish:

  • What tasks will it perform?
  • Who will use it?
  • What systems does it need to integrate with?
  • What decisions require human approval?

Step 2: Choose Your Base Agent

Select a base agent that matches your use case. Our Boutique offers specialized agents for different domains:

  • EU Funding Agent - for grant discovery and applications
  • Portuguese Accounting Agent - for tax compliance
  • Virtual Secretary - for email and calendar management

Step 3: Select Your LLM

Choose the language model that best fits your needs:

Model Best For Considerations
Claude Complex reasoning, long documents Excellent for detailed analysis
GPT-4 General tasks, code generation Wide ecosystem support
Gemini Multimodal tasks, Google integration Large context window
Llama Privacy-sensitive, on-premise Self-hosted option

Step 4: Build Your Knowledge Base

Upload documents and data that make your agent unique:

  • Company policies and procedures
  • Domain-specific documentation
  • Historical data and examples
  • FAQs and common responses

Step 5: Configure Thinking Strategy

Set up how your agent reasons through problems:

  • Chain-of-thought prompting for complex decisions
  • Step-by-step verification for accuracy
  • Reflection patterns for self-correction

Step 6: Define Human-in-the-Loop Rules

Specify when your agent should pause for human approval:

  • Before sending external communications
  • Before making financial commitments
  • When confidence is below threshold
  • For any irreversible actions

Step 7: Test and Iterate

Before going live:

  1. Test with realistic scenarios
  2. Check edge cases and error handling
  3. Verify human-in-the-loop triggers work
  4. Review outputs for quality and accuracy

Step 8: Deploy

Launch your agent via:

  • Web interface for direct interaction
  • API integration with your systems
  • Slack/Teams bot for team use

Ready to Build?

Join our waiting list to be among the first to compose your own Boutique agent.