Anti-Patterns
These are the mistakes teams make repeatedly when building LLM-powered agents. Each is well-documented, widely recognized by practitioners, and observed in production systems. They're ordered roughly by how often they appear.
Learning these is faster than discovering them yourself.
Anti-Patterns
| Anti-Pattern | The Mistake |
|---|---|
| Framework Trap | Reaching for agent frameworks before understanding the problem |
| Prompt Monolith | Stuffing all instructions into a single massive prompt |
| Infinite Loop | Deploying agents without hard limits on iterations, cost, or time |
| Vibe-Based Deployment | Shipping changes based on gut feel instead of evaluation |
| Agent Sprawl | Using multi-agent when a single agent would suffice |
| Tool Junk Drawer | Exposing too many poorly designed tools |
| Happy Path Mirage | Testing only clean inputs, ignoring adversarial and edge cases |
| Amnesiac Agent | Failing to manage what the agent remembers across turns and sessions |