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Reading / 2026-05/2026-05-07t193804-agents-need-control-flow-not-more-prompts

Agents Need Control Flow, Not More Prompts

Reliable AI agents require deterministic control flow encoded in software — explicit state transitions and validation checkpoints — rather than elaborate prompt chains, which are non-deterministic and impossible to verify at scale.

May 07, 2026 · tech · Brian Suh

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Topics

  • agentic-workflows
  • llm-orchestration
  • ai-agents
  • software-architecture
  • llm-engineering

Cited by

  • Agentic workflows

    Design patterns for AI agents acting across multi-step tasks, covering how tool access, memory, orchestration topology, and coordination overhead shape whether an agent system works in practice.

  • AI agents

    AI agents are LLM-powered systems that plan, act, and iterate autonomously; active research and engineering practice reveal deep tensions between coordination complexity, reliability, tool design, and the human oversight they still require.

  • LLM Engineering

    The practical discipline of building, evaluating, and operating systems that use large language models, spanning knowledge architecture, agent control flow, inference optimization, and the human and organizational costs of getting it wrong.

  • LLM orchestration

    LLM orchestration coordinates multiple language model agents through structured pipelines, separating planning, generation, and evaluation roles to produce reliable outputs from long-running autonomous tasks.

  • Software architecture

    Recurring patterns across component design, API validation, durable execution, and multi-agent systems show that good software architecture consistently pushes complexity to boundaries and keeps individual units of code focused on a single concern.

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