[peterbell_nyc]

Exactly this. I'm writing my own little orchestrator and memory system and because I have a modest number of workflows, I'm taking the time to specify them deterministically, describe them as a DAG (with goto's for the inevitable loops) and generate deternministic orchestration code. I'm trying to make most of the tool calls as clear and comprehensive as possible (don't make Opus convert a PDF, have a script do that and give it the text instead) and I'm putting all the things you'd expect to track state and assume ~20% task failure rate so I can simply wipe and repeat failed tasks.

Small model and (where still required) human in the loop steps for deterministic workflows can solve a surprisingly large number of problems and don't depend on the models to be consistent or not to fail.

Just invest heavily in adversarial agents and quality gates and apply transforms on intermediate artifacts that can be validated for some dimensions of quality to minimize drift.

[mrothroc]

I did the same with my own orchestrator. That's where I get my data.

It's amazing the power a simple workflow with automatic gate enforcement brings to agenting coding.