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Agentic Workflows

Why do you need a framework in the first place?

Crafting well-designed abstractions is very difficult, better to stick close to the metal.

Principles​

Core Definition of an AI Agent:

  • Direction Following: Agents must be able to take directions (human or AI) related to a specific objective.
  • Tool Access & Response: Must have access to at least one tool and receive a response from it.
  • Autonomous Reasoning: Must autonomously reason how and when to use tools to achieve the objective, not just a predefined sequence.

Context Engineering​

Focus Attention

  • Prioritize enabling the agent to "think" rather than relying solely on its pre-existing knowledge.
  • Use discrete tool calls for retrieval to feed relevant context into the agent's context window.
  • Avoid overwhelming the agent with too much information in the initial prompt (e.g., large database schemas).

Fine-tuning is (Generally) a Waste of Time:

  • Fine-tuning can decrease reasoning ability by over-fitting the model to specific task sequences.
  • Focus on ACI iteration instead.

Don't Get Overly Reliant on Abstraction Frameworks (like LangGraph) Prematurely:

  • Consider your production goals first.
  • Frameworks can be useful for prototyping, but may introduce blockers when scaling, especially regarding security (e.g., user credential cascading).
  • Building a basic agent or multi-agent system from scratch doesn't require extensive code.

The "System Prompt" is Not the Secret Sauce: The ecosystem around the agent (user experience, connections, security protocols) is more important than the system prompt itself. This is the true differentiator.

Context​

Questions​

Which engineering decision related to this topic has the highest switching cost once made — and how do you make it well with incomplete information?

  • At what scale or complexity level does the right answer to this topic change significantly?
  • How does the introduction of AI-native workflows change the conventional wisdom about this technology?
  • Which anti-pattern in this area is most commonly introduced by developers who know enough to be dangerous but not enough to know what they don't know?