Curious hiker

Last time I argued that the coordinating layer of an agent system should stay deliberately dumb — slow, discrete, symbolic — while the perceptual and temporal work gets pushed down into specialized submodels. The obvious follow-up question, and the one I got asked most, was: fine, so what does that actually look like? Isn't a dumb orchestrator just a control loop with tool calls, which everyone already has? That's the right challenge, and answering "draw the box diagram" doesn't meet it — because the diagram does look like an agent loop. The difference isn't the shape. It's the contract at the seam. Dumb-by-design is a set of rules you hold to about what crosses the boundary, and every one of them is a rule most real systems quietly break. Here are the five that matter. 1. The orchestrator holds no perceptual state. It never touches the waveform, the pixels, the raw stream — only summaries handed up by submodels. This sounds obvious and is violated co...

There is a quiet assumption running underneath most agent architectures right now: that the path to capable systems is one model that does everything. Make it bigger, make it multimodal, bolt on tools, and eventually the single monolith reasons, perceives, plans, and acts. Mixture-of-experts is the industry's one concession to specialization, and even that is a routing trick, not a design. I think this is backwards. The better structure is a slow, discrete, almost boring orchestrator sitting on top of fast, specialized submodels that each work in their own native regime — and you should resist every temptation to collapse the two into one. The nervous system already made this bet. Your prefrontal cortex is a slow serial planner. It does not process the raw waveform hitting your ear or the photon stream landing on your retina. Sensory cortices do that, in parallel, in a temporal regime the prefrontal cortex could never operate in, and they hand up a compressed summary — "a voi...