Template Thinking: Why Your Next AI Agent Should Steal from Cognitive Science
Opening — Why this matters now Multi-agent LLM systems are having their “microservices moment.” Everyone agrees single models are powerful. Everyone also agrees they are insufficient for long-horizon reasoning, planning, exploration, and collaboration. What remains less clear is how to compose them. Most agent architectures today are handcrafted, iteratively patched, and occasionally justified after the fact. The search space of possible multi-LLM pipelines is combinatorially explosive. Brute-force architecture search is expensive. Trial-and-error is slow. And in regulated domains — finance, healthcare, defense — improvisation is not a governance strategy. ...