Slow Agents

We recently upgraded from a RAG workflow to a fully agentic system. We saw significant gains in quality, but unfortunately there is no such thing as a free lunch and our median response time dropped from 3.5s to 14s. This degradation came from tool usage and a model swap from Gemini Flash 2.0 to Claude Sonnet 4 (slower but significantly stronger agentic capabilities). The response time was deemed…