Stop Building AI Agents

Hugo-Bowne Anderson¹ argues that agentic workflows shouldn’t be your first choice because of their increased complexity and instability. Remember that GenAI is like a superhuman intern prone to glitchiness and hallucination — now imagine managing a team of them.

…most agent systems break down from too much complexity, not too little. In my demo, I had three agents working together:

• A researcher agent that could browse web pages
• A summarizer agent with access to citation tools
• A coordinator agent that managed task delegation

Pretty standard stuff, right? Except in practice:

• The researcher ignored the web scraper 70% of the time
• The summarizer completely forgot to use citations when processing long documents
• The coordinator threw up its hands when tasks weren’t clearly defined

He recommends trying a simpler pattern first, like prompt chaining or orchestrator-workers.

1. I learned Python, pandas, and data science from Hugo’s DataCamp classes. ↩

Direct Link