I’ve been writing about building Agent-First SaaS and working with teams implementing LangGraph flows.
I’ve noticed a recurring pattern where we get stuck trying to perfectly replicate a human's SOP (e.g., "click this button, then read this PDF"). While reproducing human workflows is great for trust and "human-on-the-loop" auditing, I argue it often traps us in a local optimum.
This post explores the difference between "Replica Agents" (biomimicry) and "First-Principles Agents" (optimizing for the objective function). I draw on examples like Amazon's "Chaos Storage" and AlphaGo to suggest that sometimes the most efficient agent workflow looks nothing like the human one.
Curious to hear how others are balancing "legibility" vs. "efficiency" in their agent designs.
Comments
I’ve been writing about building Agent-First SaaS and working with teams implementing LangGraph flows.
I’ve noticed a recurring pattern where we get stuck trying to perfectly replicate a human's SOP (e.g., "click this button, then read this PDF"). While reproducing human workflows is great for trust and "human-on-the-loop" auditing, I argue it often traps us in a local optimum.
This post explores the difference between "Replica Agents" (biomimicry) and "First-Principles Agents" (optimizing for the objective function). I draw on examples like Amazon's "Chaos Storage" and AlphaGo to suggest that sometimes the most efficient agent workflow looks nothing like the human one.
Curious to hear how others are balancing "legibility" vs. "efficiency" in their agent designs.