Everyone is asking "should we use agents?" The real question is "when should we NOT?"
I keep seeing teams bolt an agent on because it's the hot thing — then discover they reinvented a state machine with worse debugging. Agents don't solve a problem by existing. They are a mechanism for deferring decisions to a runtime. When your inputs, tools, and failure modes are well-understood, that deferral buys you nothing but nondeterminism.
The architecture question is not "LLM or not." It is: where does the judgment boundary sit?
Three places the boundary lands
A single agent is a program. For a well-scoped task with a known toolset, you don't need a loop at all. You need a deterministic pipeline — with the LLM as one component, not the orchestrator.
