13d (edited) • Build With Me
Module 1 · Lesson 3 — How Your Agent Will Reason
📌 Read time: ~6 min | Module 1 of 8
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Agents Are Not One-Size-Fits-All Thinkers
A routing protocol does not use the same algorithm in every situation. OSPF uses Dijkstra within an area. BGP uses path attributes and policy for inter-AS routing. Same network, different problems, different mechanisms.
Agents work the same way. There are three reasoning patterns. You will use one of them 80% of the time.
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Pattern 1: ReAct — For Troubleshooting
ReAct stands for Reason + Act. The agent alternates between thinking and doing.
Thought: Neighbor is INIT. Something is preventing it moving to 2-WAY.
Check Hello and Dead timers on both ends.
Action: run_command("show ip ospf neighbor detail", device="R1-NYC")
Observation: Hello 10s, Dead 40s
Action: run_command("show ip ospf neighbor detail", device="R2-NYC")
Observation: Hello 30s, Dead 120s
Thought: Timer mismatch confirmed. Root cause found.
Draft fix and escalate for human approval.
ReAct is the troubleshooting pattern. Evidence in, decision out, next action, repeat.
This is how your senior engineers think. It is also the pattern that maps most naturally to the investigative work consuming your tier-1 team's time.
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Pattern 2: Planning — For Configuration and Deployment
Sometimes the task is not "find the problem" but "build the solution." New client onboarding. Multi-site VLAN rollout or firewall policy generation.
Goal: Deploy VLAN 200 across 12 branch switches for Client A.
Plan:
1. Retrieve current VLAN config from all 12 devices.
2. Identify conflicts with existing VLAN IDs.
3. Generate config templates per device.
4. Run dry-run, collect diffs.
5. Present diffs for human approval.
6. Push configs in sequence with rollback ready.
Use Planning when the task has multiple stages and order matters.
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Pattern 3: Reflection — For Validation
The agent generates a config change. Before showing it to you, it critiques its own output:
- Does this comply with the client's change policy?
- Does this conflict with existing routing policy?
- Is there a rollback path if this fails?
Reflection is your built-in quality gate before any output reaches a human or gets executed. Layer it onto ReAct and Planning agents — not a standalone pattern, a checkpoint.
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Pattern Selection
Scenario │ Pattern
OSPF/BGP adjacency down, unknown cause │ ReAct
New client onboarding — push baseline config │ Planning
Multi-site VLAN rollout │ Planning
Validate a config before pushing │ Reflection
Any change with rollback risk │ Add Reflection layer
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Human-in-the-Loop: The Line You Do Not Cross
Never give write access without a human checkpoint.
Read access is fine — investigate freely, run show commands, pull logs, query your RMM. The moment the agent is about to change something, it stops and asks.
This is not because the agent is unreliable. It is because trust is earned. You do not give a new engineer root access on day one. You watch their work, check their reasoning, then extend permissions.
The agents that get shut down are the ones that act without asking. The agents that get trusted are the ones that show their work.
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The pattern you will use 80% of the time: ReAct.
Tier-1 MSP work is mostly investigative. Something is broken. Someone needs to figure out why. Look at something, form a hypothesis, look at something else, narrow it down, find the cause, propose the fix. That is ReAct. That is what we build first.
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🎯 Module 1 Challenge
Write down your single most repetitive tier-1 troubleshooting task across your client base. The one you wish you never had to do manually again.
Open In Colab:
Post it in the comments below.
That is your personal use case for this course. Everything we build from Module 2 onwards, build i around that task.
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👉 Module 2 starts next: Your First Agent in Pure Python — no frameworks, no magic, just the loop.
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Module 1 · Lesson 3 — How Your Agent Will Reason
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