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: w...