Agent Architecture Patterns: The Blueprints for Autonomous AI Systems
Building production AI agents isn't about stringing together API calls—it's about choosing the right cognitive architecture that determines how your agent thinks, plans, and acts. Just as software architecture patterns like microservices and event-driven design revolutionized application development, agent architecture patterns like ReAct, Plan-and-Execute, and Reflexion are transforming how we build autonomous systems.
Key Insight
Architecture Patterns Are Your Agent's Cognitive Operating System
The pattern you choose determines not just what your agent can do, but how it thinks about problems. A ReAct agent processes information in tight thought-action-observation loops, making it excellent for real-time interactions but potentially myopic for long-horizon planning.
73%
of production agent failures traced to architecture mismatch
Analysis of 200+ enterprise agent deployments revealed that nearly three-quarters of production failures stemmed from choosing an architecture pattern misaligned with the task requirements.
Framework
Agent Architecture Selection Matrix
Task Complexity Axis
Measures the number of steps, dependencies, and decision points in your task. Simple tasks (1-3 step...
Latency Tolerance Axis
Determines how much thinking time your use case allows. Real-time chat needs sub-second responses (R...
Error Recovery Requirements
Assesses how critical self-correction is. If errors compound catastrophically, Reflexion patterns wi...
Reasoning Transparency Needs
Evaluates whether you need explainable decision trails for compliance, debugging, or user trust. Tre...
The Five Core Agent Architecture Patterns
ReAct (Reactive)
↔
Plan-and-Execute (Pr...
↕
Reflexion (Self-Impr...
↔
Tree of Thoughts (Ex...
ReAct Pattern Implementation with Amazon Bedrockpython
Implementing ReAct for Real-Time Document Assistance
User satisfaction scores increased 34% after the ReAct implementation. Average q...
ReAct Loop Termination: The Infinite Loop Risk
Without proper termination conditions, ReAct agents can loop indefinitely, consuming tokens and compute resources. Always implement three safeguards: a maximum iteration count (typically 7-15), a token budget ceiling, and semantic loop detection that identifies when the agent is repeating similar thoughts without progress.
Key Insight
The Plan-and-Execute Pattern: Think First, Act Systematically
Plan-and-Execute inverts the ReAct philosophy by front-loading cognitive effort into comprehensive planning before any action occurs. The agent first analyzes the complete task, decomposes it into subtasks, identifies dependencies, and creates an execution plan—only then does it begin taking actions.
ReAct vs. Plan-and-Execute: Choosing Your Primary Pattern
ReAct Pattern
Best for: Real-time interactions requiring sub-3-second resp...
Excels at: Tasks with 1-5 steps and clear tool-to-outcome ma...
Strength: Highly adaptive to unexpected observations and cha...
Weakness: Can lose sight of global objectives in long task s...
Plan-and-Execute Pattern
Best for: Complex workflows where upfront planning prevents ...
Excels at: Tasks with 5-20 steps involving resource allocati...
Strength: Maintains coherent strategy across long execution ...
Weakness: Initial plans can become obsolete if environment c...
Implementing Plan-and-Execute on AWS
1
Design the Planning Prompt
2
Build the Plan Parser and Validator
3
Create the Execution Orchestrator
4
Implement Adaptive Replanning
5
Add Execution Monitoring and Rollback
S
Stripe
Plan-and-Execute for Complex Financial Reconciliation
Reconciliation automation success rate improved from 34% (ReAct) to 89% (Plan-an...
Anti-Pattern: The Rigid Plan Anti-Pattern
❌ Problem
Agents complete their plans but deliver wrong outputs. In one documented case, a...
✓ Solution
Implement adaptive replanning with explicit 'plan validity checks' at regular in...
Key Insight
Reflexion: Teaching Agents to Learn from Their Mistakes
Reflexion, introduced by researchers at Northeastern University and MIT in 2023, adds a powerful self-improvement loop to agent architectures. After completing a task (successfully or not), the agent explicitly reflects on what went well, what went wrong, and what it should do differently next time.
Reflexion Memory System with DynamoDB and Bedrockpython
Bootstrapping Reflexion Memory for New Deployments
Don't launch Reflexion agents with empty memory—they'll make the same mistakes your development testing already discovered. Before production deployment, run your agent through 50-100 representative tasks, generate reflections for each (especially failures), and seed the memory store.
Reflexion Implementation Checklist
A
Anthropic
Using Reflexion for Constitutional AI Alignment
Reflexion-enhanced agents showed 23% reduction in human-flagged responses over 3...
ReAct Pattern Implementation with AWS Bedrockpython
123456789101112
import boto3
import json
from dataclasses import dataclass
from typing import List, Dict, Optional
from enum import Enum
class ActionType(Enum):
SEARCH = "search"
CALCULATE = "calculate"
LOOKUP = "lookup"
FINISH = "finish"
Framework
ReAct Decision Framework
Task Decomposability
ReAct works best when tasks can be broken into discrete steps with clear intermediate observations. ...
Tool Availability
ReAct requires well-defined tools with predictable outputs. Each tool should return observations tha...
Latency Tolerance
Each ReAct step requires an LLM call, making total latency proportional to step count. For a 5-step ...
Interpretability Requirements
ReAct's greatest strength is its transparent reasoning chain. If you need to explain agent decisions...
N
Notion
Building AI Assistants with ReAct for Workspace Queries
Answer completeness improved from 67% to 89% as measured by user satisfaction ra...
ReAct vs. Chain-of-Thought Prompting
ReAct Pattern
Interleaves reasoning with real-world actions and observatio...
Can access external tools, APIs, and databases during execut...
Self-corrects based on actual results from actions taken
Higher latency due to multiple LLM calls and action executio...
Chain-of-Thought
Performs all reasoning in a single forward pass
Limited to information provided in the initial context
Cannot verify or correct reasoning against real data
Lower latency with single LLM call for complete reasoning
Key Insight
Plan-and-Execute: Separating Strategy from Tactics
The Plan-and-Execute pattern addresses a fundamental limitation of ReAct: the inability to maintain coherent long-term strategy while handling tactical details. In this pattern, a 'planner' agent first creates a complete plan of steps, then an 'executor' agent handles each step independently.
Plan-and-Execute Architecture Flow
User Task
Planner Agent (Claud...
Plan Store (DynamoDB...
Step Functions Orche...
Plan-and-Execute with AWS Step Functionspython
123456789101112
import boto3
import json
from typing import List, Dict
from dataclasses import dataclass, asdict
@dataclass
class PlanStep:
step_id: str
description: str
dependencies: List[str]
tools_needed: List[str]
expected_output: str
S
Stripe
Plan-and-Execute for Complex Financial Reconciliation
Reconciliation tasks that took senior engineers 4-6 hours now complete in 15-20 ...
Anti-Pattern: The Monolithic Plan Anti-Pattern
❌ Problem
A fintech company planned 25 steps for a customer onboarding agent, but step 3 o...
✓ Solution
Implement hierarchical planning with 'planning horizons.' Create a high-level pl...
Key Insight
Reflexion: Learning from Mistakes in Real-Time
Reflexion extends basic agent patterns by adding explicit self-reflection after task attempts. When an agent fails or produces suboptimal results, it generates a reflection analyzing what went wrong and how to improve.
Implementing Reflexion on AWS
1
Set Up Reflection Storage
2
Implement the Evaluation Function
3
Generate Structured Reflections
4
Build the Retrieval Pipeline
5
Implement Reflection Decay
I
Intercom
Reflexion-Enhanced Customer Support Agent
First-response resolution rate improved from 72% to 86% over three months as the...
Reflection Quality Determines System Value
The effectiveness of Reflexion depends entirely on reflection quality. Vague reflections like 'I should have been more careful' provide no actionable guidance.
Tree of Thoughts Implementation with Parallel Explorationpython
123456789101112
import boto3
import json
from typing import List, Dict, Tuple
from dataclasses import dataclass
from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor
import uuid
@dataclass
class ThoughtNode:
id: str
parent_id: str
thought: str
54%
Improvement in complex problem-solving accuracy with Tree of Thoughts vs. Chain-of-Thought
The original Tree of Thoughts research showed dramatic improvements on tasks requiring exploration, such as the Game of 24 mathematical puzzle (from 4% to 74% success) and creative writing evaluation.
Framework
Pattern Selection Matrix
Task Complexity Assessment
Simple tasks (single-step, clear path) → Direct prompting or single ReAct iteration. Medium tasks (3...
Latency Requirements
Real-time (< 2s) → Optimized ReAct with caching, or pre-computed plans. Interactive (2-10s) → Standa...
Error Tolerance
Low tolerance (financial, medical) → Plan-and-Execute with human checkpoints, Reflexion for continuo...
Learning Requirements
Static tasks (same approach always works) → ReAct or Plan-and-Execute without Reflexion. Evolving ta...
Track costs at multiple granularities: per-request, per-pattern, per-tool, and per-customer. Attribu...
Essential Resources for Agent Architecture Mastery
ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models
article
LangGraph Documentation and Examples
tool
AWS Step Functions Workflow Studio
tool
Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning
article
Start with Observability, Not Features
Before building your first production agent, invest in comprehensive logging and monitoring infrastructure. The ability to replay agent reasoning, compare runs, and diagnose failures will save you 10x the time you spend building it.
Practice Exercise
Implement Reflexion for a Code Generation Agent
150 min
91%
Success rate improvement with Reflexion on HumanEval coding benchmark
Reflexion improved GPT-4's pass@1 rate from 80% to 91% on the HumanEval benchmark by allowing the model to reflect on failed test cases and retry.
Custom Agent Implementation vs. AWS Bedrock Agents
Custom Implementation
Full control over reasoning loop, prompts, and tool integrat...
Can implement any pattern: ReAct, plan-execute, ToT, Reflexi...
Requires building orchestration, state management, and error...
Higher development cost but lower per-request cost at scale
AWS Bedrock Agents
Managed service with built-in orchestration and tool calling
Primarily supports ReAct-style reasoning with action groups
Automatic integration with Bedrock knowledge bases and guard...
Lower development cost but higher per-request pricing
Pattern Selection is a Product Decision, Not Just Technical
The choice of agent pattern affects user experience in ways beyond accuracy and latency. ReAct's step-by-step reasoning can be streamed to users, creating engagement during long tasks.