freddie

I recently came across a team using an LLM to implement a state machine. They called it "agentic". They also told me it worked correctly most of the time. I asked them to write down the list of rules for moving from one state to another. They listed them out. It didn't take long for them to realize what was happening: They had built a solution using AI for a problem that didn't need AI. We removed the model and wrote some code to implement the rules. It might have taken 2-3 hours at most. They went from "it works most of the time, it's relatively fast, and it costs some tokens" to "it works 100% of the time, instantaneous, and costs nothing." So many examples like this recently. Golden rule: BUILD THE SIMPLEST THING THAT COULD POSSIBLY WORK.