12-Factor Agent Design and Review

Use the 12-Factor Agents principles as an engineering lens, not a certification checklist. The goal is to expose reliability decisions, evidence, and tradeoffs for LLM-powered software while keeping deterministic code in charge wherever it can decide safely and repeatably.

Select the mode

• Design — the user is planning a new LLM workflow or agentic feature.
• Review — code or a design/spec already exists and the user wants findings.
• Mixed — review the current system first, then design a target architecture.

If the request is ambiguous, infer the mode from available artifacts. Existing code or a concrete spec implies Review; a desired outcome with no implementation implies Design. State the selected mode in the output.

Scope boundaries