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…