Summary

At QCon AI NYC 2025, Aaron Erickson presented agentic AI as an engineering challenge rather than a simple prompt crafting task. He emphasized the importance of combining probabilistic components with deterministic boundaries to enhance reliability. The article discusses the role of specialized agents and deterministic tools in operational systems, highlighting the need for structured outputs and effective tool selection. Erickson's insights provide a framework for understanding the complexities of deploying AI in real-world applications.

💭 Your Thoughts

Totally agreed with this: "for SQL and similar query-generation patterns. The first few demos work because the questions are simple and the schema is small. Accuracy falls sharply when the schema is complex, and the query space includes many joins, edge cases, or overloaded fields. One mitigation was reducing degrees of freedom: flatten the schema, constrain query forms, and treat expressiveness as a cost that must be paid with more evaluation and additional safeguards.

Data Problems Addressed