Architecture
Agents that are observable, controllable and replaceable.
Reference architecture
Five layers, one governed system.
L1
Interface
L2
Orchestrate
L3
Agents
Agent system
- Reasoning
- Planning
- Memory
- Tool selection
- Guardrails
L4
Tools
- APIs
- Databases
- CRM
- ERP
- Search
- Documents
- External services
L5
Run & govern
Traces and evaluation results feed back into the orchestrator and agent design.
Design principles
What we hold every design to.
- 01
Explicit orchestration
Agent behaviour is modelled as graphs and state machines with clear transitions, not unbounded loops.
- 02
Typed, scoped tools
Every tool has a schema, input validation and the minimum permissions needed for its job.
- 03
Idempotent actions
Actions can be retried safely, and irreversible ones are gated behind approval.
- 04
Budgets & fallbacks
Limits on steps, time and cost, with graceful fallback to a person or a simpler path.
- 05
Evaluation harness
Scenario suites and regression evals run on every change to prompts, models or tools.
- 06
End-to-end tracing
Every reasoning step, tool call and decision is traceable for debugging and audit.
The agent loop
How an agent gets work done
- 01Goal
- 02Agent
- 03Reason
- 04Plan
- 05Tools
- 06Action
- 07Verify
- 08Outcome
Intelligent automation
- 01Trigger
- 02Understand
- 03Decide
- 04Execute
- 05Verify
- 06Notify
Idea → Architecture → Prototype → Production → Scale
Have an idea to build, or an agent to test?
Tell us what you're trying to build, test, automate or improve. We'll tell you honestly where we can make a real difference, and where we can't.
