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Building reliable agentic AI systems

martinfowler.com

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Re: Building reliable agentic AI systems

#21

Post by mattmanser »

niyikiza wrote: post #13
padolsey wrote: post #5

These vast multi-agentic systems with roles like 'Researcher', 'Writer' (with a review loop), 'Reflection agent', seem to ~feel~ mostly right but lack evals as to the merit of agent decomposition. So it forms a satisfying enough flowchart but I see no evidence these authors actually tried other approaches or agent roles. And let's be honest: an agent is just a system prompt and output contracts, and these rich archit…

What would the benefit be? A mega agent that does everything? There are some well documented advantages of decomposition...that's why the industry favours microservices over monoloths.

Bad architects favour microservices over monoliths.

YAGNI almost always applies to microservices, and the coordination overhead and boilerplate they add introduces immense costs, especially for smaller companies.

This homogenisation of architecture around Netflix size engineering has really cost our industry a lot.

Re: Building reliable agentic AI systems

#22

Post by yieldcrv »

The funniest part of these systems is that I build these massive prompt concatenating controllers with a schema to constrain what the LLM sees and parses, usually a frontier model like Gemini

The model gets it wrong on occasion and I check the input file with Claude/Opus and it just laughs at how simple it is to get the document right

And in the back of my mind I’m thinking why am I not just sending the file through Opus

Re: Building reliable agentic AI systems

#24

Post by maccard »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #17

I think for mostly search-focused use case like the one presented here AI is great as you don't ask it to build stuff or invent new drugs, you just want to retrieve relevant documents with laser precision, and agents can do that. I think right now I'm mostly disappointed with agents writing code as they always degrade the quality of the codebase after a while, and the same goes for writing in general which just requi…

> you just want to retrieve relevant documents with laser precision

My experience with using LLMs for search is that they do _not_ have laser precision. Far from it in fact. If you want to retrieve documents with laser precision AI is the wrong tool. If you want a fuzzy, lossy synthesised query response based on those documents, LLMs are great.

Re: Building reliable agentic AI systems

#25

Post by bingemaker »

bob1029 wrote: post #11

The most important part is the database that the agent can see and how clean the data is. I pitched a custom enterprise agent to a client thinking it would be maybe 50/50 time on data vs agent tuning, but it's more like 99/1. The alignment process goes very quickly once you have all the fish in exactly one barrel. I think pulling data dynamically from the source systems is where this turns into a game of whack-a-mole…

I have a question: How does connecting agent to db directly work in case of multi tenant system? There is a high chance that agent can snoop into multiple tenants and mess up the responses

Re: Building reliable agentic AI systems

#27

Post by manipalite »

AJRF wrote: post #18

Two paragraph section on Evaluation after 30 paragraphs explaining the most bog standard rag system you've ever heard of. Hmm...

Yeah that's what we're realising in building pharma specific solutions for clients, high quality eval dataset and automated evals integrated in the CI/CD process seem to be the differentiators

Re: Building reliable agentic AI systems

#30

Post by stevex »

You can almost tell the "era" that a solution was built in these days since things are changing so fast.

Mid-2026, we have very large context windows, and much smarter models than we did in 2024 when this was built. If I were to tackle this today I'd ask a current frontier model to work through the source data and design a hierarchy that would give it the ability to sift through the content itself by drilling down as it sees fit, and I expect it would nail that.

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