Designing LLM Agents with Clear Boundaries

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An LLM agent is not just a prompt with a loop around it. It is a software system that decides when to use tools, how to maintain state, and when to hand control back to a person.

Keep tools narrow

Each tool should perform one understandable operation and return structured output. Narrow tools reduce accidental side effects and make traces easier to inspect.

Make handoffs visible

A multi-agent workflow should state why a handoff happened and what context moved with it. This gives reviewers a useful trace instead of a sequence of opaque model calls.

Build evaluation into the workflow

Test tool selection, argument quality, and stopping behavior separately. A small set of deterministic scenarios can catch regressions before a larger model evaluation is needed.