Real-World Agents
Case studies: coding, support, research, ops.
26 posts · showing 21–26
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The Migration Agent: 4,000 Files and What Made It Tractable
The difference between a migration agent that saves weeks and one that produces four thousand unreviewable diffs is decided before it touches a file — and it starts with building the checker, not the agent.
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The Code-Review Agent That Commented on Everything
Nine comments on a twelve-line PR and the team muted it. Any agent asked to find things will find them — the fix is a hard cap that forces ranking, and pointing it at what humans actually miss.
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The Data-Cleaning Agent and the Column It Silently Dropped
It normalized the phone numbers, standardized the country codes, and quietly deleted 412 rows that looked untidy. Any task phrased as "make this better" reads as permission to remove what doesn't fit.
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The On-Call Agent: What It Should and Shouldn't Touch During an Incident
An incident is when your system is least understood — a poor moment for an autonomous actor, an excellent one for an autonomous investigator. The line between them is read access and write access.
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The Research Agent That Cited the Wrong Page
Every source was real and had been read. Two citations still pointed at the wrong page — one at a source that disagreed. Attribution is a lookup, and generation isn't a lookup.
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The Triage Agent That Should Have Been a Filter
A routing agent replaced a set of rules and made the common case slower, pricier, and less predictable. The lesson isn't "don't use agents" — it's that judgment is worth paying for only where judgment is required.