Why Problem Structure is the First Question You Should Ask When Building with AI
· 4 min read
In the rush to build "agentic" systems, most teams jump straight to prompting strategies, tool calling, retrieval setups, or orchestration frameworks. That's putting the cart before the horse.
The very first question you must answer, before any architecture diagram or code, is this: Is the problem (or each sub-problem) you're trying to solve well-structured or ill-structured?
This single classification determines whether traditional deterministic software, probabilistic AI (LLMs and other ML models), or a hybrid of both is the right approach.