Tools of the Trade
Frameworks, SDKs, platforms, build-vs-buy.
26 posts · showing 1–10
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Adopt the Agent Framework or Write the Loop Yourself? Count the Defaults You'd Have to Override
Framework feature lists don't settle this choice. What settles it is how many of the framework's hidden defaults your agent would have to fight, and a short audit on one real task tells you before you commit.
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Before You Adopt an Agent Framework, Try to Break Its Loop: Four Escape Hatches You'll Need by Week Three
Time-to-demo is the one framework criterion that stops mattering the moment you ship. Four seams to test in an afternoon — and the production incident each one predicts.
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Can You See the Raw Messages? The Question That Sorts Agent Frameworks
Every agent framework demos well. The one that survives your first 2am incident is the one that will hand you the exact bytes it sent to the model — and let you change them before they go.
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Framework or Raw SDK? The Test Is Whether You Can Print the Exact Prompt
The framework debate is usually argued on taste. There's a faster test: build a two-tool agent and try to dump the exact request it sends on turn four. How hard that is predicts your next six months of debugging.
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Do You Need an Agent Framework? Write the 40-Line Loop First
The agent loop is shorter than the quickstart for the framework that hides it. Write it once — then you can tell which framework features you actually need and which ones you'd be adopting on faith.
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Where Should the Agent Loop Live? Framework, Job Queue, or Workflow Engine
The choice isn't about which framework has the nicer API. It's about what a crash at step six costs — and durable execution engines carry a constraint that fights the way agents are written.
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Three Ways to Get Valid JSON, and What Each One Costs
The retry loop was working and quietly biased: the tickets needing three attempts weren't a random sample, and their eventual valid output was thinner than the truth.
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Buying vs Building Agent Capability as a Company
Framed as a technology decision, which is why it goes wrong. One question settles it: if a competitor bought exactly what you're buying, would they have what you have?
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Lock-In Risk in Agent Tooling, and How to Keep Optionality
The API call is trivially portable — the coupling forms in four other places, and the worst one isn't technical at all. One question tells you how exposed you are.
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IDE Assistants vs Agent Harnesses: Different Products, Different Futures
They get discussed as one category and have opposite requirements on latency, context, failure cost, and model tier. One is commoditizing into a feature; the other's differentiators aren't AI capabilities at all.