Last time on Obi the Explorer, I gave the restaurant chatbot a second job. It could take a booking, and now it could answer questions about the menu. A Semantic Router sat near the front and chose which path a message took.
Last time on Obi the Explorer, I wrote about the design of the simplest possible restaurant chatbot. It had one job: to take a table booking. The surprising bit was that the LLM only did two of the seven jobs.
Recently, I've been playing around with cognitive architecture design. Don't worry, I'll dive into it in just a bit. But what I have found is that they make building AI agents easier because you have to actively invest in planning how data flows in and out, as well as the agent's decision-making, reasoning, grounding, and memory.
Over the last year, demand for intelligence has skyrocketed. Agentic AI is more popular than ever. However, the popularity of the infrastructure necessary for its acceleration is declining rapidly. Everybody hates datacenters. New York moved to block the construction of new hyperscale data centres, but Starcloud is here to save the day. Or is it?
One file can't hold a rulebook, a process, and the actual grunt work without losing the thread on all three.
That's what our first version of this system did. It doesn't anymore.
Flock Safety's cameras have helped solve over a million crimes. Its audit tool just caught nine cops abusing the system in one day. Both of those facts are true, and neither one settles the actual question: who decides how much surveillance is worth how much safety and who gets to check the checker?
How our data team stopped trusting a coding agent to remember the process.
TL;DR: An AI agent will write you a dbt model that compiles, passes every test, and is wrong. Adding more instructions doesn't fix this, because the real gap is memory, not knowledge. We moved the process out of the agent's head and into the repo: seven phases, each a gate that must be verifiably passed before the next can start. Below is the whole workflow, what triggered it, and what it's caught so far.
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