Advanced AI Engineering Flowchart

Choose the Engineering Pattern by System Risk

The right AI architecture depends on the task, data source, freshness, tool access, risk level, and evaluation results. Do not start with agents or fine-tuning unless the simpler pattern fails.

The Decision Flow

• Is the task mostly formatting, drafting, classification, or structured extraction? Start with prompting and structured outputs.
• Does the answer depend on private, changing, or permissioned knowledge? Add RAG with retrieval evals and access controls.
• Does the workflow require external actions? Add tool calling with strict schemas, permissions, logging, and approval gates.
• Does the task require multiple dependent steps? Consider a narrow agent with state, step limits, and observability.
• Is behavior inconsistent even after prompting, examples, schemas, and retrieval improvements? Evaluate fine-tuning against cost, maintenance, and quality gains.
• Can the system affect customers, money, data, production systems, or security boundaries? Add deterministic controls, eval gates, human review, and incident response.

Architecture Should Follow Evidence

Use evals, logs, user feedback, latency, cost, and failure analysis to decide when to add complexity. The simplest reliable architecture is usually the best starting point.