From Pipelines to Reasoning Agents

When you should NOT use agents

If a deterministic pipeline solves it, use that. Agents introduce cost, variance, and new failure modes.

• Single-shot Q&A with stable retrieval.
• Strict latency budgets without caching.
• High-risk outputs without guardrails.

When agents are worth it

Agents shine when the system must plan, call tools, verify, and iterate.

• Tool use (search, APIs, DB lookups).
• Multi-step reasoning and validation.
• Workflow orchestration (LangGraph-style state machines).

A safe agent design pattern

Treat the agent as a coordinator — not a free-form chatbot.

• Constrain tools and schemas.
• Log every tool call.
• Add stop conditions and budget limits.
• Verify answers with retrieval-backed citations.

What to log for reliability

If you can't debug it, you can't ship it.

• Prompt version + tool parameters.
• Retrieved docs (ids + scores).
• Latency per step.
• Refusals, retries, and fallbacks.

If you want to discuss architecture tradeoffs for your use case, reach out at srivastavark@gmail.com.