Agent runtime lesson: not every request needs to touch the LLM
HmmmThisIsOdd · reddit · 2026-09-15
The author shares experience building an agent runtime where classes of work the system already understands deterministically skip the model entirely — execute and verify without semantic reasoning.
Key design points
- Keep the obvious cases obvious: handle known operations directly, send clearly interpretive work to the model, and use classification only for the genuinely ambiguous middle.
- Routing and authority must stay separate: even when a model decides what should happen, the same component shouldn't automatically be trusted to execute and declare success.
- The hard problem is where the deterministic boundary ends: too many special cases turns routing into its own maintenance burden, while putting a classifier in front of everything makes even obvious requests depend on probabilistic routing.
The author asks the community where they drew that line in production — a clean split, or a routing layer that became its own problem?
Related event: Rethinking Agent Runtimes: Not Every Request Needs an LLM(2 posts)→
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