Behavior-Space Architecture

Problem

A single fixed pipeline forces every request through every subsystem it bundles, which pays for retrieval, graph traversal, and multi-agent fan-out even when a query needs none of them. Each extra layer is a feature and a failure surface at once, so a maximal architecture maximises both spend and the ways a simple query can break. The system needs a way to spend only the subsystems a given query actually requires.

Solution

Model the agent as a pool of independent subsystems and a router rather than a wired graph of layers. For each incoming query the router classifies intent and required capabilities, then activates the minimal subset of subsystems that query needs and bypasses the rest; a trivial query may activate the bare loop alone, a complex one a retrieval-plus-graph-plus-memory subset. The subsets are disjoint and non-nested across query classes, so the architecture that actually runs is a property that emerges query by query instead of a shape chosen once at build time. Design effort concentrates on the routing heuristics and their evaluation, and a new subsystem is built only when a query class is shown to route through it, so the pool grows on demand rather than upfront.

When to use

• Production traffic is mixed, so different query classes need genuinely different and largely disjoint capabilities.
• Heavyweight subsystems (retrieval, knowledge graph, multi-agent) are expensive or slow enough that running them on every query is wasteful.
• Routing decisions can be made deterministic, inspectable, and evaluated against labelled query classes.