Parallel by Default: Manufacturing Agents Need Routing, Not One Reasoning Mode
TL;DR for operators A manufacturing process planner has to preserve relationships across geometry, drawing requirements, material constraints, manufacturing rules, process order, and tooling. If a tolerance or surface-finish requirement is attached to the wrong CAD feature, later reasoning can be internally coherent and still produce the wrong plan. Design-to-Plan addresses that problem with a hybrid architecture: deterministic components handle precision-sensitive perception and machining calculations, while LLM agents reason through structured tools and retrieved manufacturing knowledge.1 Across three 100-case downstream benchmarks, parallel configurations reached 100% execution success and more consistently invoked the tools expected for each case. They also cut average token use from 22,481 to 8,896 for process sequencing and from 36,659 to 11,868 for tool selection. Knowledge retrieval was the exception, where parallel coordination slightly increased token use. ...