Module 2 of 7Lesson 1 of 2~17 min
Decide when an agent is worth its cost
Lesson 1 of the module "Agent, workflow or a single call?" in the course "Design reliable agents and tool calling".
Lesson objective
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to classify a use case as a single call, a workflow or an agent using five explicit criteria, and justify that choice to a team.
Where it fits
Agent, workflow or a single call?
Does my use case justify an agent, and if not, which simpler pattern should I choose?
Lessons in this module
- Decide when an agent is worth its cost (this lesson)
- Choose the right workflow pattern
What you will learn in the course
This lesson is part of the course Design reliable agents and tool calling
- Decide, with explicit criteria, whether a use case calls for a single call, a workflow or an agent, and choose the right pattern.
- Write tool cards the model uses well (name, description, parameters, return, errors, idempotency, risk level).
- Specify an agent's loop (goal, context, stop conditions, budgets, error handling) and judge whether an orchestrator and subagents are warranted.
- Place human approval points and an agent's permissions according to the blast radius of each action.
- Identify prompt-injection paths through tool outputs and specify structural mitigations that do not rely on the prompt alone.
- Specify the trace of a run and the evaluation of an agent (task success, trajectory, cost, latency, consistency over several trials).
Related courses
- Build an AI assistant for your productAdvanced · ~3 hr
- Design a RAG architecture that fits your productAdvanced · ~3 hr 30 min
- Evaluate an AI feature: test sets, metrics and LLM judgesAdvanced · ~3 hr