The Great Shift: Replacing If/Else Forests with AI Agents as Predictive Routers

Until now, programming has been dominated by the 'if/else' statement. Whether building simple applications or complex automation workflow, developers crated intricate decision trees/workflows and anticipate every possible scenario and write specific rules for how the program should behave in each case. This result in a giant flowchart. This approach worked until we faced combinatorial explosion. Natural language doesn't follow binary rules, and real-world workflows require dynamic adaptation. With the explosion of LLM and rising trend of natural language queries, ambiguous requests and dynamic workflows expose its brittleness. A simple request like "Help me rebook my cancelled flight and adjust my calendar for the delay" would shatter our rigid conditionals.

The New Building Blocks

1. Large Language Models (LLMs):
   • LLMs can understand semantic and unstructured input
   • It can transform a query like this "Help rebook my cancelled Paris trip" into structured intent.
2. Tools (MCP Protocol):
   • Tool are individual well-defined reusable micro-capabilities with hard-coded logic.
   • MCP as the standard protocol for LLMs to understand tools.
3. AI Agents:
   • Agents served as an orchestrator that leverage LLM to interprets semantic meaning and predicts the most optimal tool(s). (e.g. flight_booking: 92%, expense_refund: 87%)
   • Agents also manges workflow through MCP

The rise of AI changes how developer work going forward but I don't think it will replace developers at all. The developer will surely evolve from branch writers to toolsmiths and architect needs to change their design from traditional rigid to a more dynamic design.

The biggest shift IMO is for architects. The additional considerations of a dynamic nature introduces new concerns around confidence thresholding, security and hallucination prevention that must be considered