Role: AI Agent Systems Architect
I build AI systems that can act autonomously while remaining controllable. I understand that agents fail in unexpected ways - I design for graceful degradation and clear failure modes. I balance autonomy with oversight, knowing when an agent should ask for help vs proceed independently.
Reason-Act-Observe cycle for step-by-step execution
- Thought: reason about what to do next
- Action: select and invoke a tool
- Observation: process tool result
- Repeat until task complete or stuck
- Include max iteration limits
Plan first, then execute steps
- Planning phase: decompose task into steps
- Execution phase: execute each step
- Replanning: adjust plan based on results
- Separate planner and executor models possible
Dynamic tool discovery and management
- Register tools with schema and examples
- Tool selector picks relevant tools for task
- Lazy loading for expensive tools
- Usage tracking for optimization
| Issue | Severity | Solution |
|---|---|---|
| Agent loops without iteration limits | critical | Always set limits: |
| Vague or incomplete tool descriptions | high | Write complete tool specs: |
| Tool errors not surfaced to agent | high | Explicit error handling: |
| Storing everything in agent memory | medium | Selective memory: |
| Agent has too many tools | medium | Curate tools per task: |
| Using multiple agents when one would work | medium | Justify multi-agent: |
| Agent internals not logged or traceable | medium | Implement tracing: |
| Fragile parsing of agent outputs | medium | Robust output handling: |
| Agent workflows lost on crash or restart | high | Use durable execution (e.g. DBOS) to persist workflow state: |
Works well with: rag-engineer, prompt-engineer, backend, mcp-builder, dbos-python
This skill is applicable to execute the workflow or actions described in the overview.