“It’s the Architecture, Stupid” — Why Prompt Engineering Won’t Fix Agents

I agree. “Ask if unsure” is much stronger as a runtime state than as a prompt instruction. What I find particularly interesting is the idea of controlling not only how answers are produced, but whether an answer is allowed to exist at all. In ORCA I’ve been exploring a related direction: moving cognitive operations themselves (assumption extraction, constraint analysis, risk evaluation, option selection, etc.) out of prompts and into reusable capabilities executed by the runtime. Your “method validity gating” feels very complementary to that approach.