Phase 04 — Context and Agency
Models do not act in isolation. Products assemble context, retrieve evidence, expose tools, persist state, recover from failure, and decide when a human must approve an action.
Mental model
Context supplies temporary knowledge; retrieval selects evidence; tools add effects; orchestration owns state and authority. Keep those layers separable so each can be evaluated and constrained.
Roadmap through the branches
Exit criteria
You can distinguish context from model memory, evaluate a retriever separately from generation, specify tool contracts and permissions, prefer deterministic workflows when possible, and design retries and approval gates as explicit state transitions.
Connects to: Phase 03 — Training and Inference · Phase 05 — Measurement and Trust
Core sources
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation — retriever-generator factorization.
- ReAct — reasoning and acting loop.
- Building Effective Agents — workflow and agent design boundaries.