Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 4): Subagent Orchestration

Engineering | Christian Tzolov | January 27, 2026 | ...

Instead of one generalist agent doing everything, delegate to specialized agents. This keeps context windows focused—preventing the clutter that degrades performance.

Task tool, part of the spring-ai-agent-utils toolkit, is a portable, model-agnostic Spring AI implementation inspired by Claude Code's subagents. It enables hierarchical agent architectures where specialized subagents handle focused tasks in dedicated context windows, returning only essential results to the parent. Beyond Claude's markdown-based format, the architecture is extensible—supporting A2A and other agentic protocols…

This Week in Spring - January 27th, 2026

Engineering | Josh Long | January 27, 2026 | ...

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As I write this, I cannot believe we're nearly at the end of the month! Time sure flies.

Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 3): Why Your AI Agent Forgets Tasks (And How to Fix It)

Engineering | Christian Tzolov | January 20, 2026 | ...

Have you ever asked an AI agent to perform a complex multi-step task, only to find it skipped a critical step halfway through? You're not alone.

Research shows that LLMs struggle with "lost in the middle" failures—forgetting tasks buried in long contexts. When your agent juggles file edits, test execution, and documentation updates, important steps can silently disappear. One solution, inspired by Claude Code, is to make planning explicit and observable with the help of a dedicated TodoWrite tool. The result: agents that never skip steps and workflows you can observe in real-time.

This is Part 3 of our Spring AI Agentic Patterns series. We've covered Agent Skills for modular capabilities and AskUserQuestionTool for interactive workflows. Now we explore how TodoWriteTool

This Week in Spring - January 20th, 2026

Engineering | Josh Long | January 20, 2026 | ...

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's already the 20th of January and we are off on yet another rip roarin' adventure as we look at the week that has been... this week in Spring!

Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 2): AskUserQuestionTool - Agents That Clarify Before Acting

Engineering | Christian Tzolov | January 16, 2026 | ...

Traditional AI interactions follow a common pattern: you provide a prompt, the AI makes assumptions, and produces a response. When those assumptions don't match your needs, you're left iterating through corrections. Each assumption creates rework—wasting time and context.

What if your AI agent could ask you clarifying questions before providing answers?

The AskUserQuestionTool addresses this. It allows the AI agent to ask clarifying questions before answering, gathers requirements interactively, and creates a specification aligned with your actual needs from the start.

Spring AI's…

This Week in Spring - January 13th, 2026

Engineering | Josh Long | January 13, 2026 | ...

Hi, Spring fans, and welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's the 13th of January, 2026, and it's been quite the week indeed! Let's dive right into it!

Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 1): Agent Skills - Modular, Reusable Capabilities

Engineering | Christian Tzolov | January 13, 2026 | ...

subtitle: "LLM-Agnostic Skills That Run in Your Environment"

Agent Skills are modular folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that AI agents can discover and load on demand. Instead of hardcoding knowledge into prompts or creating specialized tools for every task, skills provide a flexible way to extend agent capabilities.

Spring AI's implementation brings Agent Skills to the Java ecosystem, ensuring LLM portability—define your skills once and use them with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, or any other supported model.

This is the first post in our Spring AI Agentic Patterns series. This series explores the spring-ai-agent-utils toolkit—an extensive set of agentic patterns for Spring AI, inspired by Claude Code. We'll cover Agent Skills (this post…

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