Not everything needs an agent - 3 questions I use to decide agent vs script

Reddit r/AI_Agents News

Summary

The author shares three questions to decide between AI agents and scripts, emphasizing procedure knowledge, item count, and independence, with cost and speed trade-offs.

I build agents for a living and still get surprised what they pull off. Also seeing them in places where a script wins. Three questions I ask before reaching for an agent: Is procedure known? If steps writable beforehand, script is faster/cheaper/deterministic. Agents shine figuring steps as they go, reacting. Deploy/sync/convert = code. How many items? Great for one complex case (one bug, one doc deep dive). 10k items = per-item LLM latency/cost adds up, script does seconds. Are items independent? Item 47 unrelated to 46 in same context hurts - details leak, conflates customers/errors. Independent = process independently, trivial in code, awkward in agents. Sweet spot: procedure unknown, small cases, interrelated. Also cost/speed: seconds vs ms matters to waiting user. You're paying per token to reason about what might not need reasoning. Disclosure: I build agent infra. Where do you draw the line? Any anti-patterns you've hit?
Original Article

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