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System Design

Real-World Case Studies

Agent products read as five controls (route, gate, isolate, review, bound): two first-party cases, one illustrative failure priced at 2026-10-08 list prices, and the rule for citing a precedent without being caught out.

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Staff11 min readFirst readModel RoutingAgent Failure Modes

After this section you can

  • Price a cheap-first step from token counts and list prices, and say what it saves.
  • Name the controls a shipped agent documents, and the ones it does not.
  • Cite a production precedent with its source, its date and its trade-off.
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Real-World Case Studies

Read a shipped agent as five controls, price each one, and cite a precedent with its source and date.

Key idea

Shipped agents are built from five controls: route cheap work first, gate risky actions, isolate each worker, review the change before it lands, and bound the run. Cite a control only when a first-party source documents it.

Claude Code documents all five controls; the OpenAI sample documents one
FIVE CONTROLS, THREE SYSTEMS OpenAI pipeline cookbook sample Claude Code product docs Refund agent illustrative Route cheap work before the long run Gate classify each action before it runs Isolate each worker gets its own copy Review a person sees the change Bound step and spend caps, stop rules documented by a first-party page none found

Claude Code's route dot is a subagent model setting you choose, not a router. Pans sideways on a phone.

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