Everyone is building AI agents. Fewer people are asking whether they should. In this session I make the case that autonomous agents are a default architectural mistake: they increase fragility, destroy debuggability, and make failures harder to reason about than the deterministic systems they replace.

I am not anti-agent. I am anti-cargo-cult.

Drawing on a concrete decision framework, I will show you exactly where agents earn their complexity and where they do not. We will work through the operational line between a chatbot and a true agent, three diagnostic questions every team should answer before building, and real examples of where agents fail catastrophically in production.

You will leave with a strong default bias toward simpler architectures, and a clear, defensible test for when breaking that default is actually justified.