What LLM Agents Can Do and How They Work
In this section, we present a carefully selected set of examples to illustrate the key agent capabilities and their underlying mechanisms (through prompt design) across various applications. These examples are summarized in the next Table, with each presented in a self-contained manner.
| Example | Domain | Memory | Role-play | Planning | Tool use | Cooperation | Reflection |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Generative Agents | Social simulation | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| The AI Scientist | Scientific discovery | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| CellAgent | Biology | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| The Virtual Lab | Medicine | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| MetaGPT | Software engineering | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| FinAgent | Finance | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Voyager | Game | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Mobile Agent | Mobile devices | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| PaLM-SayCan | Embodied AI | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Jump to Any Example
Audiences can jump directly to a specific example without needing to follow them in sequence.
Generative Agents
Simulated people with memory, reflection, and daily planning.
The AI Scientist
Idea generation, experiment iteration, and paper writing without humans.
CellAgent
Planner, executor, evaluator triad for scRNA-seq and ST data analysis.
The Virtual Lab
Principal-investigator orchestration with AI-human collaboration.
MetaGPT
Software teams in a box: PM, architect, engineer, QA.
FinAgent
Multimodal market intelligence, reflection, and tool-augmented trades.
Voyager
Automatic Minecraft curriculum with reusable skill libraries.
Mobile Agent
LLM translates natural language into swipe, tap, and type sequences.
PaLM-SayCan
Separate "say" usefulness from "can" feasibility for grounded robotics.
If you find this work helpful, please consider citing our paper:
@article{hu2025hands,
title={Hands-on LLM-based Agents: A Tutorial for General Audiences},
author={Hu, Shuyue and Ren, Siyue and Chen, Yang and Mu, Chunjiang and Liu, Jinyi and Cui, Zhiyao and Zhang, Yiqun and Li, Hao and Zhou, Dongzhan and Xu, Jia and others},
journal={Hands-on},
volume={21},
pages={6},
year={2025}
}