Structural Plasticity in AI Agents: What AI systems can learn from neurobiology

Author here. I've been wrestling with a core tension in building AI agents: the balance between rigidity (for safety and predictability) and fluidity (for actually handling the messiness of the real world).

Right now, most agents seem to fall into two traps: they are either so rigidly scripted that they break the moment a user deviates from the happy path, or they are so fluid that they hallucinate and drift off-task.

This post argues that we need "Structural Plasticity" in our agent architectures—allowing the system to dynamically re-route its own logic flows when it hits a blocker, rather than just forcing a retry or failing silently. It's an attempt to define a middle ground where an agent can be adaptive enough to be useful, but structured enough to be safe.

Would be curious to hear how others are handling exception handling and "adaptation" in production agents right now.