Contract-First vs Assertion-First: LLM Agent Reliability

When an agent pipeline fails in production, the question is: where was correctness being enforced, and when did it break down? Two approaches. Different tradeoffs. Assertion-First async def score_company(state: dict) -> dict: assert state.get("enriched"), "must be enriched before scoring" result = await llm.run(score_prompt, state) assert result.get("score") is not None return {**state, **result} Fast to write. Familiar. Works fine for small pipelines. Problems at...