chapter one
1 The agent paradigm shift
This chapter covers
- Output, behavioral, and environmental uncertainties of agent systems
- How classical design patterns evolved into agent design patterns
- Why every agent pattern has an engineering ancestor
- What qualifies a software system as an agent and the vocabulary used to describe its design
- Building Argus, a code review agent
"The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one is far from a cumulative process. It is rather a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals."
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
I was impressed by what coding agents can do, until an engineer working on a mature business system showed me what they did not know. He told me about a coding agent that was asked to add a controlled rollout to an existing service, exposing a new behavior to a small share of users. The repository already had the team's rollout utility, but the agent built another one. The implementation looked reasonable in isolation; inside the system, it created a second mechanism that could drift from the first.