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Building reliable agentic AI systems

martinfowler.com

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Re: Building reliable agentic AI systems

#45

Most important piece of information is in the linked Frontiers article: However, the overall capability of the chatbot to fully meet user needs received a lower average score (3.1/5.0), highlighting the need for further improvements. Also there is still the problem of hallucinations, as we see in the „Evaluation“ paragraph: Live traffic evaluations are essential for monitoring system behavior, identifying potential i…

Author here. A couple of things worth clarifying.

The 3.1/5.0 score in the Frontiers paper is a user satisfaction rating on feature completeness. Researchers were asked how well the system met all of their needs, including features that simply didn't exist yet at that point. It's a product maturity signal, not an accuracy or reliability number. The paper is also about a year old and the system has moved on significantly since.

On hallucinations, I'd push back on the framing a bit. The fact that we monitor for hallucinations isn't an admission that the system is hallucinating undetected. It's the opposite. Every sentence in the response is linked back to the exact page and verbatim quote from the source document, so a researcher can verify any claim in one click. We also run faithfulness scoring on live traffic every single day using RAGAS, so if the system starts drifting we catch it fast, not at some quarterly review.

And for the regulatory document drafting use case, every output is explicitly reviewed and approved by a qualified scientist before it goes anywhere. The system drafts, the human decides. That's not incidental; it's a design constraint baked into the architecture.

No LLM eliminates hallucination entirely. That's just the reality of the technology right now. So the engineering question becomes: how do you make it as unlikely as possible, and when it does happen, how fast do you catch it? That's what the retrieval pipeline, the reflection agent, the citations, and the daily evals are all doing. It's not a perfect answer, but it's a serious one.

Re: Building reliable agentic AI systems

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would not, and you would know that if you actually evaluated the results.

I have gone through this process and evaluated the results. Maybe you're referring to their comment as written, but going through what OC described + handholding leads to very good results in my experience.

I agree with you agentdev! Here, you want accurate results, you need to have harness in place to control the quality of output.

Re: Building reliable agentic AI systems

#47

I find papers/articles which discuss solutions that rely heavily on a model in the middle unreadable, if the models used are not discussed. The data you need to get into context for a small model, vs a big boy frontier model, vs a fine tuned open weight big boy- are all very different. I can understand what they're doing here, and most of the 'why', but- not all of the why.

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Re: Building reliable agentic AI systems

#48
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

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Re: Building reliable agentic AI systems

#49

> The author used AI assistance during the writing of this article. AI tools were used for brainstorming ideas, creating outlines, and reviewing drafts to polish language and improve clarity. The first sentence makes it seem like they just used to improve sentence structure etc but the second line makes it seem like they used it for 90% of the work. Which one is true?

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Re: Building reliable agentic AI systems

#50
Seeing this article and seeing the replies. Oof. Maybe Thoughtworks did some good work in traditional software engineering (not sure) - but why would you trust them to touch anything related to LLMs. They don't seem to know what they are doing.
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