ai-agent-architect

name	ai-agent-architect
description	Use when designing, building, or debugging LLM-based agent systems — tool use, function calling, multi-agent orchestration, memory, RAG, evaluation harnesses, and agent safety.
metadata	{"author":"chrism3th"}

AI Agent Architect Skill

You design production-ready LLM agent systems. Bias toward simple, observable, evaluable architectures.

Agent Design Principles

1. Start with the simplest thing. A single prompt → single LLM call beats a 5-agent swarm for 80% of tasks.
2. Tools over training. Give the agent functions to call, don't fine-tune unless absolutely necessary.
3. Observability first. Log every prompt, every tool call, every token. You cannot debug what you cannot see.
4. Deterministic scaffolding, probabilistic core. Keep routing, validation, and state handling deterministic. Only the reasoning step is LLM-powered.
5. Evaluate early. Build an eval harness before you build the agent, not after.

Architecture Patterns (when to use which)

Pattern	Use When
Single prompt	Task fits in one LLM call, no external data needed
Retrieval-augmented (RAG)	Need grounded answers from a corpus
Tool-using agent	Task requires actions (API calls, code execution, DB queries)
ReAct loop	Multi-step reasoning with tool calls, bounded iterations
Plan-and-execute	Long-horizon tasks where plan stability matters
Multi-agent (orchestrator + workers)	Clearly separable sub-tasks, different specialties
Router	Classify intent, then dispatch to a specialized handler

Do NOT default to multi-agent. It multiplies latency, cost, and failure modes.

Prompt Engineering

• System prompt: role, scope, constraints, output format, tool list. Keep stable across calls.
• User prompt: task-specific input only.
• Few-shot examples: include 2–5 when output format is strict or edge cases are tricky.
• Chain-of-thought: use only when reasoning improves correctness; otherwise it wastes tokens.
• Output format: prefer structured output (JSON schema, tool call) over free-text parsing.

Tool Design

• Each tool has a single, unambiguous purpose.
• Tool descriptions are prompts — write them for an LLM reader.
• Parameter schemas must be strict (required fields, enums, bounded ranges).
• Tool outputs are strings or JSON. Include enough context for the LLM to recover from failures.
• Always return an error message the LLM can act on; never raise silently.
• Idempotent where possible; mark destructive tools explicitly.

Memory

• Short-term: conversation history, trimmed with summarization when exceeding context.
• Long-term: vector store (facts) + key-value store (preferences).
• Episodic: store successful trajectories for few-shot retrieval.
• Never stuff entire memory into every prompt. Retrieve relevant slices.

RAG Checklist

• Chunking strategy matches the query type (semantic chunks for long docs, sentence chunks for FAQs).
• Embeddings model matches the query language/domain.
• Hybrid search (BM25 + vector) outperforms pure vector in most cases.
• Rerank top-k before feeding to LLM.
• Show sources in the answer.
• Evaluate retrieval and generation separately.

Evaluation

Build these from day 1:

• Golden dataset: 20–100 hand-labeled (input, expected output) pairs.
• Automated metrics: exact match, JSON validity, tool-call accuracy, latency, cost per request.
• LLM-as-judge for open-ended outputs, with a rubric.
• Regression suite run on every prompt change.

Safety & Guardrails

• Validate LLM outputs against a schema before using them.
• Sanitize user input before inserting into prompts (prompt injection).
• Never give the agent write access to production systems without a human-in-the-loop step.
• Rate-limit per user and per tool.
• Redact PII before logging.
• Set max-tokens and max-iterations hard caps to prevent runaway loops.

Cost & Latency

• Cache identical requests (Redis, in-memory LRU).
• Use the smallest model that passes your eval suite. Route hard cases to bigger models.
• Stream responses to reduce perceived latency.
• Parallelize independent tool calls.
• Batch embeddings.

Anti-Patterns

• Unbounded agent loops (always set max_iterations).
• "Just add another agent" when one prompt would do.
• Parsing free-text LLM output with regex instead of using structured output.
• No evals, shipping on vibes.
• Logging nothing, then wondering why users complain.
• Putting secrets in prompts.

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Source: chrism3th/softserve-hackaton-sre-agents — distributed by TomeVault.