The Two Layers That Decide Whether Your Agent Survives

I have read a lot of agent architecture content over the last two years, and almost all of it is about the same layer: how the agent thinks . Prompt chaining, routing, orchestrator-workers, evaluator-optimizer, ReAct, plan-and- execute. That layer is genuinely well served, and I am not going to add to it. Here is the uncomfortable thing I keep running into instead. The incidents I have seen and reviewed did not come from picking the wrong orchestration pattern. They came from an agent that was…