Agent Architecture Patterns

Most agent failures are architectural, not prompt-level.

Pick the pattern that matches the task's decision shape, not the framework that's trending. The wrong pattern multiplies cost, latency, and failure modes.

When to use this skill

• The user is sketching a new agent or rewriting an existing one.
• The user describes symptoms — looping, drifting, exceeding budget, losing context — that point at the architecture, not the prompt.
• The user names a framework (LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, Swarm) and wants to know which pattern to instantiate.
• The user is comparing single-agent vs. multi-agent for a given workload.

Decision flow

Walk this top-down before recommending anything.