Why Agentic AI Needs Patterns
When I ran our worldwide Agentic AI hackathon spanning 300+ developers across geographies, one theme emerged clearly: teams that shipped working agents fast were not those with the cleverest prompts. They were the ones who treated agent design with the same rigour as any distributed system.
Agentic AI is not a prompt wrapped in a loop. It is a distributed system with non-deterministic components. The same engineering instincts that served us in microservices — loose coupling, clear interfaces, observable internals — apply directly.
The Core Patterns
1. The Orchestrator–Worker Split
Separate the "what to do" from the "how to do it." Your orchestrator holds the goal and the plan. Workers execute discrete, bounded tasks. This mirrors the separation of concerns we've practiced for decades.
Why it matters: Orchestrators that also execute become monoliths. When something fails, you can't tell if the planning was wrong or the execution was wrong.
2. Checkpoint-and-Resume
Any multi-step agent that runs longer than a second needs explicit state checkpointing. Store intermediate state externally. Assume the agent will die mid-task and design for recovery.
This is not optional. In production, it is what separates demos from systems.
3. Tool Contracts as APIs
Every tool your agent calls should be treated like a public API — versioned, documented, and defensively implemented. The agent is just a client. The tool is the boundary.
If you wouldn't expose it without rate limiting in a REST API, don't expose it to an agent either.
4. Observability First
You cannot debug an agent you cannot observe. Instrument every LLM call: latency, token counts, model version, tool invocations, and outcomes. Use structured logging, not print statements.
The teams that struggled in the hackathon were flying blind. The teams that shipped had traces.
Closing Thought
The fundamentals of good software engineering do not change just because the component calling your code is a language model. Treat agents like you would any other service — and they will behave like one.