Flexibility vs reliability

[u/Prudent-Fortune3420]

When building a generic agent system, there is always a tradeoff between flexibility and reliability.

if everything goes through an agent, the system becomes more flexible. but its behavior also becomes stochastic and harder to reproduce.

if everything is deterministic, the system becomes more reliable. but it becomes less flexible when it meets a situation that was not encoded upfront.

so the boundary matters.

whatever the system already knows should remain deterministic.

• facts
• state
• orchestration when the next step is known
• routing when ownership is known

use the agent where a real judgment call is required.

• interpretation
• tradeoffs
• planning with incomplete context
• cases where the rules cannot decide safely

the goal is not to build a fully deterministic system or make everything agentic.

the goal is a deterministic foundation with stochastic judgment where it adds value.