Streaming agents prove planning is dead
Real-world agents don't need perfect plans, they need perfect reactions.
The obsession with perfect planning is killing AI agents. While everyone builds elaborate reasoning chains and multi-step workflows, the real breakthrough is streaming decision agents that think and act simultaneously. Planning assumes you know what’s coming next. Reality laughs at that assumption.
Planning dies in production
Traditional agents spend ages crafting detailed execution plans before taking their first action. They map out every step, consider every contingency, then watch their beautiful plan crumble the moment something unexpected happens. Streaming agents flip this entirely. They commit to immediate actions while continuously replanning based on new information.
This isn’t just faster response times. It’s a fundamental shift from batch processing to real-time adaptation. When your environment changes every few milliseconds, the agent that spends ten seconds planning the perfect approach has already lost.
Partial reasoning beats perfect reasoning
The magic isn’t in the quality of individual decisions. It’s in the volume and speed of course corrections. Streaming agents make acceptable decisions quickly, then immediately start improving them. They’re always partially right and always getting righter.
Static planners optimise for the best possible path. Streaming agents optimise for the fastest recovery from inevitable mistakes. In dynamic environments, recovery speed matters more than initial accuracy.
We’ve been building chess players when we needed jazz musicians.