3.1. Planning an Agent Solution

💡 First Principle: Every planning question reduces to audience and consequences. Who will talk to this agent, what may it show them, and what happens when something goes wrong? Answer those first and the technical selections — auth mode, channels, governance controls, component boundaries — mostly make themselves.

Skipping the planning pass has a signature failure: an agent that works in the demo and fails at rollout — because external users can't authenticate, the channel doesn't reach the audience, DLP blocks the connector in production, or Legal discovers ungoverned answers. Exam case studies are built from exactly these post-hoc discoveries; your job is to spot them pre-hoc.