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316 posts · showing 251–260
2026
10 posts-
OAuth for Agents: Acting on Behalf of a User
A service account with everyone's access puts your entire access-control model inside a model's judgment. Per-user tokens move the check to where prompt injection can't reach it.
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The Verifier in the Loop: Designing an Oracle Your Agent Can Iterate Against
Coding agents work as well as they do because compilers exist. In other domains the oracle is something you build — and most tasks have one hiding in them if you spend ten minutes looking.
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What a System Prompt Should and Shouldn't Contain
Five things belong in a system prompt. Most of what accumulates there — tool instructions, deterministic rules, incident patches, data — belongs somewhere it would actually work.
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Where Agents Don't Belong (Yet)
Six task shapes where the agent architecture is the wrong fit regardless of model quality — each with a tell you can check in an afternoon, before committing a quarter to it.
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Queueing and Backpressure for Agent Workloads
A run can take four seconds or four minutes, and you can't tell in advance. Size the pool to the provider's rate limit, split queues by shape — and check the one timeout relationship that silently runs your task twice.
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Observability for Agents: What to Log Beyond the Trace
A trace explains one run and nothing about your system. The two layers above it — run records and aggregates — plus three agent-specific signals that standard APM will never suggest.
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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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Sandboxing Code Execution: What a `run_code` Tool Actually Needs
One tool replaces dozens — and hands a model that reads untrusted text a general-purpose mechanism for doing anything the process can do. Four boundaries, four isolation levels, and the one people leave open.
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Canary Releases for Prompt Changes
A sentence added to fix one behavior routinely changes three others. Ship prompts like behavior: versioned by rendered hash, split by stable key, and compared on tool distribution — the row nobody collects.
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Chunking for Agents Is Not Chunking for Search
Search results are read by a person who fills in the gaps. An agent doesn't — it acts on the fragment. That one difference changes how you chunk, how many you return, and what "no results" should mean.