Library// topic
Choosing the shape of the system
In short
The decision made before any code exists: what problem shape this actually is, whether it needs an agent loop, a fixed pipeline, a classifier or no model at all, how much autonomy the task can carry, and whether prompting, retrieval or training is the right lever — which process to automate first is an organisational question and sits in the adoption cluster.
2 pages
definitions
- An agent loop: a goal, a tool set, carried state and a stopping ruleFour mechanical parts decide whether a system is agentic. Remove one and you have a pipeline with a model in it — often the better system, and always cheaper to run.definition6 min
- Prompt chaining, defined: the primitive between one call and a loopThe author fixed the path. That one property separates a chain from a state machine, which branches, and from an agent loop, which chooses its own next move.definition6 min
Other topics in Library
See allRetrieval and grounding: answering from your own contentEverything that happens at query time — how a passage is chosen, ranked, filtered by permission and cited — and how you tell 'the wrong documents came back' apart from 'the right documents, badly used'; the plumbing that gets content into the index lives in the data cluster, and eval methodology lives in the release-gate cluster.20 pagesData readiness, pipelines and keeping the corpus trueThe unglamorous half of every AI build — whether the data is usable at all, how it gets in, how it stays fresh, and how deletions, duplicates and schema drift are handled before anything is indexed or inferred over; one-off migrations of a legacy dataset belong to the integration cluster.16 pagesDeciding what to build, and who builds itThe pre-engagement decision — whether to build, buy or configure, whether to hire in-house or bring in a partner, how studios, consultancies, agencies and freelancers actually differ, and how to justify the spend and run diligence on a vendor whose security posture rests on controls rather than certificates.6 pages
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