Mixture of Agents on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming

Advanced Agents From First Principles 16: Where Should an Agent Spend Its Compute? Build a Dynamic Budget Scheduler

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:53:00 +0100

Where Should an Agent Spend Its Compute?

A production agent has a budget whether you designed one or not.

Every model call costs something.

Every search node costs something.

Every tool invocation costs something.

Every verifier costs something.

Every retry adds latency.

Every escalation to a stronger model spends money and time that could have been used somewhere else.

The naive architecture gives every subsystem its own fixed limit:

MAX_STEPS = 20
MAX_SEARCH_NODES = 32
MAX_CRITIC_CALLS = 3
MAX_RETRIES = 4
MAX_VERIFIER_CALLS = 2

That looks safe.

Advanced Agents From First Principles 11: Which Advanced Agent Architecture Should You Use? A Practical Selection Guide

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 09:20:00 +0100

Which Advanced Agent Architecture Should You Use?

You now have too many options.

That is a better problem than having none.

But it is still a problem.

You can add:

self-consistency,
Tree of Thoughts,
beam search,
Monte Carlo Tree Search,
evolutionary search,
specialist routing,
planner/executor/critic separation,
multi-agent debate,
adaptive policies,
learning from previous runs,
or a mixture-of-agents runtime that chooses among several of them.

The temptation is to combine everything.

Advanced Agents From First Principles 10: Are You Combining Every Agent Technique Into One Monster? Build a Mixture-of-Agents Runtime

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:25:00 +0100

You have a working agent.

Then you add retrieval.

Then memory.

Then Best-of-N.

Then critique and revision.

Then Tree of Thoughts.

Then MCTS.

Then specialist models.

Then adversarial review.

Then a planner, executor, critic and verifier.

Then a stronger model for hard cases.

Eventually the architecture starts to look like this:

request
  ↓
planner
  ↓
retrieval
  ↓
reasoning
  ↓
Best-of-N
  ↓
critic
  ↓
Tree of Thoughts
  ↓
MCTS
  ↓
frontier model
  ↓
second critic
  ↓
verifier

Every mechanism may have been individually reasonable.