Designing Agents

Expert guidance for choosing architecture patterns and context strategies for agentic AI systems.

Before Designing

Gather this context (ask if not provided):

1. Task shape — Is the workflow predictable/structured or open-ended? How many steps? Can steps run in parallel?
2. Constraints — Latency budget? Cost sensitivity? Need for human approval at checkpoints?
3. Context pressure — How much information must the agent reason over? Will tasks exceed a single context window?
4. Existing infrastructure — What models, tools, and frameworks are already in play?

Core Principle: Context Is Everything

Effective agent design boils down to context management. Models degrade as context grows — every token depletes an "attention budget." The central design question is: