Designing Reliable Agent Workflows
Hi there! In this post, I’ll show you how to design reliable workflows that improve agent performance. We’ll cover how to fix vague roles, enforce strict inputs/outputs, and manage state explicitly. Why agents fail Most failures come from design, not intelligence. Vague roles confuse agents. If one agent has to plan, do the work, and judge the result, it often loses focus and goes off track. Loose inputs and outputs hide problems. Free-form text makes it easy to sound right while being wrong. Missing state causes loops. If the system doesn’t track what ran and what failed, it repeats the same mistakes. No guardrails means risky actions slip through. With unchecked access, one bad step can cause real damage fast. Weak error handling makes failures messy. Blind retries and late escalation lead to quiet breakage or endless retries. When do you need this? Not every task needs three agents and a state machine. If you just need to “summarize this text” or “write a haiku,” a single prompt is fine. ...