PRODUCTION SCENARIO
A logistics client asks for an autonomous multi-tool agent to classify 5,000 inbound shipping exceptions a day into 12 stable categories. Each exception fits in one message and the categories have not changed in two years.
Which approach should the delivery team ship first?
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Show answer and explanation
Answer: A single LLM call with retrieval and worked examples, evaluated on a labeled hold-out set
The guidance is to start with simple prompts, optimize them with comprehensive evaluation, and add agentic systems only when simpler solutions fall short; single-message inputs and two-year-stable categories are exactly that case. Orchestrator-workers plans subtasks this task does not have. An autonomous loop trades latency and cost for a flexible step count when the work always takes one. A five-stage chain adds 25,000 human reviews a day to a task with no stages.
Official Source: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents ↗