Deterministic vs Agentic: The Quiet Architectural Bet Every AI Agent Company Is Making

Every "AI agent" product on the market is making one of two architectural bets, and the founders usually can't articulate which. The bet decides whether your agent costs cents or dollars per run , whether it works the same way twice, and whether it will still be running a year from now. It's worth naming. The Two Camps Fat harness, agentic. The LLM decides every step at runtime. Every run is a fresh plan. Every plan costs tokens. Every step is an opportunity for the model to go somewhere new. Ex