All posts
Everything published here, newest first.
316 posts · showing 241–250
2026
10 posts-
The File System as a Tool: Underrated Agent Infrastructure
Four hundred thousand rows won't fit in a context window; a path and a preview cost nothing. A scoped directory solves large results, durable state, and reviewable artifacts at once — if you resolve paths correctly.
-
State Machines for Agents in Regulated Flows
When doing steps out of order is a compliance failure regardless of outcome, a model-decided control flow is the wrong shape. Put the ordering in code, the conversation in the agent, and scope the tools per state.
-
Tool Calls or Structured Output? Two Mechanisms, Two Jobs
Both emit schema-conforming JSON, which makes them look interchangeable. One expects a result back and one ends the turn — and that single difference decides every other question.
-
Give the Agent a Scratchpad: External Working Memory
Three small tools stop the context from being the only place findings can live. Compaction stops being lossy, long runs stop growing, and you get a readable record instead of a forty-turn transcript.
-
Multi-Tenancy for Agent Products: The Boundaries That Must Hold
Data, memory, context, and capacity — four boundaries, and two of them are agent-specific enough that no existing multi-tenancy checklist mentions them. Few-shot examples harvested from production are a leak.
-
Treating Prompts Like Code: Versioning, Review, and Rollback
A one-line edit in a web console changes behavior across every request, with no history and no way back. Prompts in the repo, rendered hashes in the logs, eval results in the PR — and a quarterly prune.
-
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.
-
Data Exfiltration Paths You Forgot Your Agent Had
A URL fetch sends data in the request. A rendered markdown image leaks from the viewer's browser, bypassing every tool-level control. Enumerate the paths — several of them look like features.
-
Testing Multi-Agent Systems Without Losing Your Mind
Add a second agent and end-to-end assertions stop telling you anything useful. Contracts at every seam, stubs for the supervisor's unhappy paths, and integration tests that assert on graph shape and cost.
-
Deadlock, Livelock, and the Agent That Waits Forever
A deadlocked thread pool gives you a stack trace. Deadlocked agents produce fluent, plausible activity that looks like work — and bill you for it until someone notices.