All posts
Everything published here, newest first.
316 posts · showing 101–110
2026
10 posts-
Positions Worth Revising About Agents
Eight beliefs that are reasonable on their face and don't survive production. Every correction points the same direction — which makes it a useful prior for the next problem.
-
Reading the Agent Discourse Without Being Misled
Two questions handle most of it: what specifically was the input, and what specifically checked the output? Almost every overstated claim is weak on one of them.
-
Agent Vocabulary: What the Terms Actually Mean
People discussing the same word are frequently discussing different things. Four of the distinctions are load-bearing — and when an agent conversation isn't converging, it's usually one of them.
-
The First Agent to Deploy in a Company That Has None
The first one shapes how much latitude every later one gets. Which means the right choice usually isn't the most valuable use case — it's the one most likely to succeed where people can see it.
-
Working With an Agent as a Pair, Not a Vending Machine
Describe, wait, review, repeat — the mode most people start in and the one that hits a ceiling fastest. The difference is fifteen seconds spent on what you know that isn't written down.
-
The Second-System Effect in Agent Deployments
The first agent works because it was scoped well. The second aims at exactly the cases the first one escalated — which is the residual that resisted automation for structural reasons.
-
When to Stop Improving an Agent
There's always another failing case, so without a stopping rule the work either never ends or ends arbitrarily. The signal isn't the error rate — it's effort per point of improvement.
-
The Economics of an Agent-Heavy Team
Several line items move and only one of them is tokens. The savings are real, land on a single term, and are partly consumed by four others that grow — which is why big speedups produce modest delivery gains.
-
How to Run an Agent Pilot That Produces a Decision
Most pilots end without a decision because they were designed to produce a demo. Write the threshold before you build — and sort the failures by cause, because "no-go" and "fix one thing" look identical in the average.
-
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?