Building the Agentic Enterprise

4

Core Architectural Patterns for Agentic Systems

This chapter turns decomposition into architecture. Once the problem has earned agentic complexity, the next challenge is choosing the right shape for it: who plans, who executes, who routes, who evaluates, and where the control boundaries need to sit for the system to survive Day 2.

In Chapter 3, we tackled the question of one agent or many: when a single agent is enough, when decomposition is justified, and how orchestration complexity has to be earned rather than assumed. This chapter takes the next step. Once you have decided that decomposition is warranted, what architectural shape should the resulting system actually take?

That brings us to the patterns themselves: Planner-Executor, Controller-Worker, ...