HACKER Q&A
📣 laxmena

When did you move from AI agentic loops to simpler deterministic system?


Industry is increasingly moving towards complex, autonomous agentic loops and feedback chains. They obviously comes with significant latency, non-determinism, low-accuracy and cost.

I'm interested in hearing from engineers who have moved in the opposite direction.

At what point in your product lifecycle did you decide that agentic approach was wrong tool for the job?

What was the specific failure mode (reliability, cost, latency, maintainability) pushed you to replace agentic loop with more deterministic system/pipeline?

  👤 mickelsen Accepted Answer ✓
When you have a flow well defined, like transactions going on, it simply doesn't scale. But AI can then be used for analysis, alerts and investigating failures of such processes very nicely. Agents can also be used to prepare a transaction package that needs more human input, like a customer service case, but again with clearly defined outcomes. At least that's what I've seen in my limited experience consulting for a local online retailer.