Building Reliable Agentic Systems: Eno Reyes
Aug 20, 2024 · 18:14
Eno Reyes, CTO of Factory.ai, explains how his team builds reliable agentic systems—called Droids—for automating software development tasks by applying techniques from robotics and control systems to handle planning, decision making, and environmental grounding. Reyes describes a pseudo-Kalman filter that passes intermediate reasoning through plan steps, converging reasoning but risking error propagation. He advocates for explicit plan criteria and hard-coded logic to improve reliability, despite reducing generalizability. On decision making, he recommends consensus mechanisms like self-consistency, explicit reasoning with checklists, fine-tuning for out-of-distribution decisions, and simulation via Monte Carlo tree search. For environmental grounding, he emphasizes building custom AI computer interfaces for domain-specific workflows, designing explicit feedback processing (e.g., parsing CI/CD logs), balancing bounded exploration with long-context models, and incorporating human guidance to boost reliability from 30–40% to 90–100%.
