Issue
Single Step Carries Too Many Decisions
One prompt, workflow step, review stage, or agent action carries too many decisions for the system or user to evaluate cleanly.
What This Looks Like
One step in the workflow is expected to make too many decisions at once. It may classify, summarize, score, approve, route, format, check policy, choose tools, and decide next actions in a single pass. The step becomes overloaded, and users cannot easily tell which decision failed.
Why It Matters
Decision density makes review and correction harder. If many decisions are packed into one step, a failure in one decision can affect the rest. The user may have to rerun or review the whole step instead of isolating the specific decision that needs attention.
Structural Signal
A single workflow node carries more decision responsibility than it can cleanly expose or govern. The issue is not just that the step is complex; it is that decision load is concentrated in one place without enough separation.
Common Triggers
- A prompt asks the AI to perform several decision types at once
- A review stage combines scoring, routing, approval, and feedback
- Tool choice and output generation happen in the same step
- The workflow lacks intermediate checkpoints
- Multiple authorities are collapsed into one agent action
- The step is optimized for speed instead of inspectability
When to Use This Issue
Use this Issue when one AI prompt, agent action, workflow step, or review stage carries too many decisions to inspect, control, or correct reliably.
When Not to Use This Issue
Do not use this Issue when a step is long but decisions are clearly separated and reviewable. Do not use it when the problem is missing ownership for one specific decision.
Category
Primary Pattern
Declared Patterns
Density Spike
A structural condition where nodes, edges, dependencies, decisions, or effects concentrate sharply within a localized region beyond declared thresholds.
Unbounded Scope
A structural condition where an operation, authority, rule, or expansion has no declared upper bound, boundary, or termination condition.
Missing Authority
A structural condition where a region, action, state, or decision path exists without a declared governing authority.
Derived Primary Lenses
Absence Lens
Detects structurally required elements that are missing from the observed structure.
Authority Overlay Lens
Maps declared authority hierarchies onto observed structure to detect absence, override, or conflict.
Compression Lens
Reduces structural graphs into stable minimal representations for comparison, redundancy detection, and diffing.
Constraint Sufficiency Lens
Evaluates whether declared constraints are sufficient to eliminate structural degrees of freedom.
Isolation Boundary Lens
Evaluates whether structural constraints, effects, and regions remain contained within declared boundaries.
Variance / Entropy Lens
Measures structural variability across repeated or comparable evaluations and identifies divergence beyond expected bounds.
Derived Secondary Lenses
Conflict Lens
Detects mutually incompatible constraints, claims, states, or declarations that cannot be simultaneously satisfied.
Escalation Gradient Lens
Measures structural growth or intensification across sequential executions, states, or transitions.
Reconciliation Lens
Evaluates whether structural changes align with declared authority updates, version changes, or reconciliation rules.
Search Intents
- single step carries too many decisions
- AI workflow step overloaded
- one step has too many decisions
- prompt asks for too many decisions
- review step overloaded
- AI step carries too much responsibility