Choosing a Stack
Use this guide to choose a default stack quickly, then tune for cost and reliability.
Default Recommendation
Section titled “Default Recommendation”For most production apps:
const agent = await ReactiveAgents.create() .withProvider("anthropic") .withModel("claude-sonnet-4-20250514") .withReasoning({ defaultStrategy: "adaptive" }) .withTools() .withMemory("1") .withGuardrails() .withCostTracking() .withObservability({ verbosity: "normal" }) .build();Decision Matrix
Section titled “Decision Matrix”| Decision | Start here | Move when |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | You need local/offline (ollama) or existing proxy infra (litellm) |
| Model tier | Mid/high capability | Latency or budget pressure dominates quality |
| Memory tier | Tier 1 | You need semantic similarity retrieval (Tier 2 vectors) |
| Reasoning strategy | Adaptive | Workload is consistent and you want deterministic behavior |
| Tools | Built-ins only | You need external systems via MCP/custom tools |
Strategy Selection Cheat Sheet
Section titled “Strategy Selection Cheat Sheet”| Workload | Strategy |
|---|---|
| API automation / deterministic tool work | reactive |
| Long multi-step tasks with explicit plans | plan-execute |
| Exploration and branching ideas | tree-of-thought |
| Self-critique and iterative improvement | reflexion |
| Mixed unknown workloads | adaptive |
Cost-First vs Quality-First Profiles
Section titled “Cost-First vs Quality-First Profiles”Cost-first profile
Section titled “Cost-first profile”.withProvider("ollama").withModel("qwen3.5").withContextProfile({ tier: "local", toolResultMaxChars: 800 }).withReasoning({ defaultStrategy: "reactive" }).withMaxIterations(6)Quality-first profile
Section titled “Quality-first profile”.withProvider("anthropic").withModel("claude-sonnet-4-20250514").withReasoning({ defaultStrategy: "adaptive" }).withMemory("2").withVerification().withMaxIterations(20)Team-Based Starting Points
Section titled “Team-Based Starting Points”Internal copilots
Section titled “Internal copilots”- Guardrails + identity + audit
- Tier 1 memory
- Adaptive strategy
- Normal observability
Autonomous operations agents
Section titled “Autonomous operations agents”- Gateway + policies + kill switch
- Strong budgets and alerts
- Event subscriptions for suppression/exhaustion events
Research/reporting agents
Section titled “Research/reporting agents”- Tools + verification + memory tier 2
- Plan-execute or reflexion
- Higher max iterations
Anti-Patterns to Avoid
Section titled “Anti-Patterns to Avoid”- Turning on all layers before proving need
- Using Tier 2 memory without embedding provider configured
- Long max iterations without budget controls
- MCP subprocess usage without guaranteed disposal
Next Steps
Section titled “Next Steps”- Tune context budgets in Context Engineering
- Configure tools and MCP in Tools
- Harden production defaults in Production Deployment