Practice — Agent Architectures and the Agentic Loop (5 questions)

Your company wants an LLM-powered system that reviews submitted expense reports. Two versions are on the table:

Version A: "Read the report, check it against the three standard policy rules (receipt attached, amount under $500, category is one of five allowed categories), and output approve / flag / reject with a reason."

Version B: "Read the report, investigate anything that looks off — cross-reference against the employee's travel calendar, check for duplicate submissions against the last 90 days of reports, look up whether the vendor is a known contractor the company already pays through payroll — and produce a recommendation with full justification."

1. For each version, decide: fixed workflow or agent? Justify each decision using the criteria for "when not to build an agent."
2. For whichever version you decided is an agent, specify concrete step/tool-call budgets and what should happen when the budget is hit.
3. A colleague argues Version A should "also be an agent, just in case we add more rules later." Explain why that reasoning is backwards.