Strategy

Designing Reliable Agentic Workflows

Agents need clear boundaries, measurable success criteria, and human override paths.

10 min read2025-12-01

Agents are unreliable by default

Open-ended instruction following leads to hallucination, infinite loops, and cost overruns.

Agents need explicit constraints and termination conditions.

Bounded agency

Define a fixed action space: agents can only call specific tools.

Set max iterations and cost caps per request.

Require human approval before high-stakes actions (transfers, deletions).

Best practices

Use structured outputs and validation to prevent malformed commands.

Log all decisions and intermediate steps for auditing.

Test agents with adversarial inputs and edge cases before production.

Monitor for new failure modes and collect feedback for retraining.

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