What are the most essential skills for an AI agent today?

Question

Which skills are actually essential for an AI agent right now? Im torn between prioritizing complex function calling or just sticking to a solid RAG setup for memory.

I'm building a bot for my London shop and only have $50/mo for tokens so I cant have it looping and wasting money... need it by Monday. Which one is better?

BlackPuddingBite · Accepted Answer

Like someone mentioned, RAG is the winner for a tight budget. Function calling loops and burns cash. I used this for a project last month and was really satisfied. To hit your Monday deadline:

Use Mistral 7B Instruct v0.2 for cheap processing.

Try Qdrant Cloud Free Tier for store data.

Get Voyage AI voyage-lite-02-instruct for embeddings. Honestly no complaints tbh. It works well and stays cheap.

mqpoklyrxg · Answer

Honestly, function calling is a mess for low budgets. I tried it for a local project and it kept looping... super disappointing. It basically ate my whole budget in an afternoon. You just need a solid RAG setup. I had issues with expensive databases so I moved to Supabase Vector pgvector Storage for my embeddings. Pair it with Anthropic Claude 3 Haiku API since it is way cheaper and handles context way better without those logic loops.

casinoxloa · Answer

I would suggest sticking to RAG for your shop bot. Function calling is honestly too risky with a $50 budget because it might loop and drain your tokens in minutes. Be careful with complex logic.

use OpenAI gpt-3.5-turbo-0125 for cheap and fast responses

set up Pinecone Serverless Vector Database for simple memory Make sure to test your prompts thoroughly before Monday so it doesnt hallucinate pricing.