Comment by kpen11

I think you're missing step 3! A key part of building agents is seeing where they struggling and improving performance in either the prompting or the environment.

There are a lot of great posts out there about how to structure an effective prompt. One thing they all agree on is to break down reasoning steps the agent should follow relevant to your problem area. I think this is relevant to what you said about brute forcing a solution rather than studying the problem.

In the agent's environment there's a fine balance to achieve between enough tools and information to solve any appropriate task, and too many tools/information that it'll frequently get lost down the wrong path and fail to come up with a solution. This is also something that you'll iteratively improve by observing the agent's behavior and adapting.