Architecture choices and reliability
Compare solutions for quality, privacy, cost, latency, availability and maintenance. A larger model, a chain of agents or self-hosted infrastructure is not automatically better. More components bring more dependencies and failure modes to understand.
Define input and output contracts, size limits, timeouts, concurrency controls and failure behaviour. Automatically retrying an operation that sends messages or charges payments can duplicate effects. Consider idempotency, retry limits and compensating actions where relevant.
If extraction fails, the process can send the document for manual review. It should not invent fields or repeat an external action indefinitely without knowing whether the previous attempt succeeded.
Choosing an architecture also means explaining how it fails and recovers.
Try it yourself
Conduct an architecture review: draw data flows and trust boundaries, list permissions and external effects, propose adversarial tests, and define monitoring, owners, rollback and incident response. Request independent review.