Practical Agent Engineering for South Africa

An agent that works in a demonstration still needs two kinds of engineering before it can be trusted with a service. Someone has to decide which model handles each piece of work, and someone has to own the loop that calls the model and runs its tools. This series covers both for South African executives, architects and engineers. Part 1 treats model routing as a session-aware control decision: hard policy gates before any router, routing at the user-turn boundary, the cost of losing the prompt cache, and measurement by cost per accepted outcome. Part 2 sets out the runtime controls around the loop: budgets, typed stop reasons, hooks, the difference between cancelling a run and interrupting it for approval, checkpoints, redaction and the trace. It follows Gamtoos Valley Municipality, a fictional Eastern Cape municipality, through its citizen help service and its burst-pipe dispatch. Both parts draw on a small public-safe lab with synthetic data and simulated models, so its numbers show how to measure, not how any real model performs. Research claims were checked on 5 November 2026.

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