Agents move fast. They also turn your codebase into wet noodles by Friday.
I build this stuff solo. I pressure tested it with my AI helpers and real users. Here are 7 patterns that keep you shipping fast without turning everything into mush:
- Typed Prompt Function - treat a prompt like a pure function. Schema in, schema out. Validate or fail fast.
- Tool-first orchestration - keep the agent dumb, make tools smart. LLM routes, your code does the work.
- Small loops, hard stops - short plans with strict step and token budgets. Always return a status.
- Event trace + replay - record prompts, tool calls, seeds, versions. Reproduce bugs offline.
- Cache and idempotency - hash LLM calls, add idem keys to side effects. Save money, avoid double hits.
- Prompt packs with golden tests - ship prompt+schema+fixtures. Pin behavior, spot regressions quickly.
- Ports and adapters - tiny interfaces around vendors. Swap providers without surgery.
This is not theory. The difference is night and day:
- Freight train vs scooter. Big agents try to think forever, burn tokens, and still miss. Small loops with budgets finish or escalate with a clear draft and TODOs.
- Mystery soup vs clean flow. Typed prompts and golden tests turn hand-wavy magic into repeatable behavior you can refactor.
- Vendor lock vs freedom. Ports let you move from Serp to local grep in one line and keep your sanity.
Here is the catch: temperature 0 is not a time machine. Seeds lie across providers. Models drift, APIs wobble, caches go stale. Aim for behavioral replay with captured stubs, not bitwise clones. Log cost, step count, and final status every run. If you cannot replay yesterday’s failure without the network, you are guessing.
Start here if you are solo:
- Do 1 and 3 today. Your code gets calmer overnight.
- Add 5 and 4 next. Costs drop, bugs get tractable.
- Stabilize with 6 and 7. Keep the agent thin and tools thick. 🚦
My take: ship agents like you ship functions. Contracts, tests, tiny interfaces. Keep the brain in tools, not in prompt poetry. If a framework does not save you time this week, skip it. 🧰
Which two patterns will you ship this week? If you want a tight Russian recap, say so.