Patterns for Reliable LLM Agents

After building several agent systems, some patterns keep coming back. These aren’t theoretical — they’re the things that made the difference between a demo and something that actually works.

1. Structured Output, Always

Don’t parse free-form text. Use function calling or constrained decoding. Every agent call should return typed data.

2. Retry with Backoff, Not Hope

LLM calls fail. Rate limits hit. Wrap every call in exponential backoff with jitter. Budget for ~5% failure rate in your latency estimates.

3. Memory is a Database Problem

Don’t stuff everything into context. Use a retrieval layer. Vector search for semantic recall, structured queries for facts.