An agent that can act the instant it finishes reasoning is fast, and it is dangerous in exact proportion to how hard its actions are to undo. The speed is real and often worth having. The danger is that the first place a wrong assumption becomes visible is in the state it has already changed. By then the cost…

Almost every instruction an agent receives is under-specified in some way. A human hands off a goal that seemed complete when they wrote it, and the agent discovers, partway in, that the words admit more than one reasonable reading. The output format was never stated. The scope has a soft edge. A pronoun points at two possible things. This is not a failure…

The moment a plan begins to run, it meets a world it did not fully model. A tool returns something the plan never anticipated, a resource that existed at design time has moved, a value comes back valid but wrong for what the next step assumed. This is not a defect in the planning. It is the ordinary condition of acting…

Dispatching work to run concurrently is the easy half of parallel execution, and it is the half everyone thinks about. A single control point splits into several branches, each branch runs at the same time as the others, and the total time drops from the sum of the branches to the length of the longest one. That part is close…

A pipeline that runs its steps in a strict line is the default most systems settle into, and rarely because the work demanded a line. A line is simply the easiest thing to write: code that calls one function, then the next, then the next, reads back as a process and mirrors how anyone would narrate the task aloud, so steps keep…

Once you have accepted that a complex goal has to be broken into pieces, a second question arrives that is easy to skip past: what shape does the broken-down work run in? There are only three answers that matter, and almost every agentic system is some arrangement of them. Work can be nested, so that a high-level intent is split into…

The reliability of an agentic system is mostly settled before the model runs a single step. It is settled in how the work was cut. Hand an agent a large, monolithic goal and it has to invent the structure the goal lacks: it has to decide on its own where one piece of the job ends and the next…