--- title: Don't Let the LLM Drive - Ornella Bahidika & Joel Allou,... description: Microsoft engineers Ornella and Joel present Ace, a live AI voice tutor built with a state-machine harness that controls lesson flow rather than delegating... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/don-t-let-the-llm-drive---ornella-bahidika-joel-allou-microsoft-afer80jq4 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Don't Let the LLM Drive - Ornella Bahidika & Joel Allou, Microsoft | daily.dev og:description: Microsoft engineers Ornella and Joel present Ace, a live AI voice tutor built with a state-machine harness that controls lesson flow rather than delegating... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/don-t-let-the-llm-drive---ornella-bahidika-joel-allou-microsoft-afer80jq4 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/aFeR80Jq4.png og:image:alt: Don't Let the LLM Drive - Ornella Bahidika & Joel Allou, Microsoft og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Don't Let the LLM Drive - Ornella Bahidika & Joel Allou, Microsoft **[AI Engineer](https://daily.dev/sources/aidotengineer)** · 6 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Microsoft engineers Ornella and Joel present Ace, a live AI voice tutor built with a state-machine harness that controls lesson flow rather than delegating control to the LLM. The core insight is that multi-step agent reliability is a control problem, not a prompting problem. By engineering a harness that defines each lesson step (intro, teach, check, grade, advance, wrap) and feeds the model only the input needed for that specific step, they constrain the model to single-action outputs. The harness validates responses and advances state — the model never decides where it is in the flow. This approach allowed them to replace a large frontier model (Claude Opus) with a smaller, cheaper, faster model (Claude Haiku) without sacrificing performance. The pattern applies broadly to coding agents, ops runbooks, and onboarding flows. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Dispatches from O'Reilly: The accidental orchestrator](https://daily.dev/posts/dispatches-from-o-reilly-the-accidental-orchestrator-wh0brtwni) · Stack Overflow Blog · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [How I write software with LLMs](https://daily.dev/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms-jekylkhup) · Hacker News · 2 upvotes · 0 comments - [Building Enterprise AI Agents That Are Both Autonomous and Reliable](https://daily.dev/posts/building-enterprise-ai-agents-that-are-both-autonomous-and-reliable-blaoyo1qn) · Salesforce Engineering · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#general-programming](https://daily.dev/tags/general-programming), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/don-t-let-the-llm-drive---ornella-bahidika-joel-allou-microsoft-afer80jq4) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Don't Let the LLM Drive - Ornella Bahidika & Joel Allou, Microsoft","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/don-t-let-the-llm-drive---ornella-bahidika-joel-allou-microsoft-afer80jq4","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/don-t-let-the-llm-drive---ornella-bahidika-joel-allou-microsoft-afer80jq4"},"datePublished":"2026-07-20T06:39:39.225Z","dateModified":"2026-07-20T08:47:55.599Z","description":"Microsoft engineers Ornella and Joel present Ace, a live AI voice tutor built with a state-machine harness that controls lesson flow rather than delegating...","image":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/m24UKZomm7k/sddefault.jpg","thumbnailUrl":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/m24UKZomm7k/sddefault.jpg","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"AI Engineer","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"AI Engineer","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--u5PucxNT--/f_auto/v1724338940/logos/aidotengineer","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/aidotengineer"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/don-t-let-the-llm-drive---ornella-bahidika-joel-allou-microsoft-afer80jq4","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"general-programming,llm,ai-agents","timeRequired":"PT6M","video":{"@type":"VideoObject","name":"Don't Let the LLM Drive - Ornella Bahidika & Joel Allou, Microsoft","description":"Microsoft engineers Ornella and Joel present Ace, a live AI voice tutor built with a state-machine harness that controls lesson flow rather than delegating...","thumbnailUrl":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/m24UKZomm7k/sddefault.jpg","uploadDate":"2026-07-20T06:39:39.225Z","duration":"PT6M","url":"https://api.daily.dev/r/aFeR80Jq4","embedUrl":"https://www.youtube.com/embed/m24UKZomm7k"}} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"AI Engineer","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/aidotengineer"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Don't Let the LLM Drive - Ornella Bahidika & Joel Allou, Microsoft"}]} ```