Stop Letting LLMs Control Lead Capture Logic — Hybrid State Machine Approach Outperforms Full LLM Orchestration
Reddit r/SaaS·medium signal
A builder shipping a 6-stage conversational lead capture tool documented why delegating all flow control to the LLM — when to request contact info, when to advance stages — produced unpredictable behavior and poor conversion. The fix: a deterministic state machine controls timing and stage transitions while the LLM handles only language generation within each stage. This practitioner-documented split — deterministic code as orchestration layer, LLM as language layer — is an increasingly important architectural principle for production AI-native products.