schema · growing
Agentic design patterns
Router, Adaptive, Corrective, Self-RAG, Multi-agent — and which pain each one fixes.
Agentic RAG is not one architecture, it is a family of patterns. Do not build them all — add one at a time, knowing which failure it fixes.
Routerread the intent, send it to the right source
Adaptivescore difficulty: easy → LLM, hard → agent
Corrective (CRAG)bad retrieval → search the web or rewrite
Self-RAGthe model decides whether to retrieve at all
Multi-agentplanner, researcher, synthesiser, validator
Rendering diagram…
Which one for which pain
- Questions go to different sources → Router.
- Most questions are easy, a few are hard → Adaptive (you pay for agentic quality only on the hard ones).
- Retrieval sometimes comes back empty → Corrective.
- Answers need several documents combined → Multi-agent.