#agent-design
Every post tagged "agent-design".
112 posts · showing 101–110
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One Search Tool or Five? Getting Tool Granularity Right
Five narrow search tools or one with filters? The choice doesn't remove errors, it relocates them — and one of the two places is much cheaper to defend.
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The Planner That Plans Too Much: When Upfront Decomposition Hurts
An agent found the root cause in step one and executed the remaining seven steps anyway. Plans in context outweigh the evidence that should kill them — unless revision is something the loop can actually do.
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Prompt, Tool, or Code? Where Each Piece of Logic Belongs
A rule the agent keeps breaking usually isn't a prompting failure — it's deterministic logic filed under "advice." Two questions place any behavior in the right one of three homes.
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Chain, Blackboard, or Broadcast? Three Ways Agents Share State
Chains lose the evidence, blackboards fight over it, broadcasts drown in it. Pick by which failure your task can absorb — and log provenance from day one or debugging becomes guesswork.
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Framework or Plain Loop? Four Questions That Actually Decide It
The core agent loop is under a hundred lines — that's never what a framework saves you. Four situational questions decide it, and the one about 3am debugging should carry the most weight.
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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.
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Trim, Summarize, or Retrieve? Three Ways to Survive a Long Agent Run
Trimming loses the oldest information, summarizing loses specificity, retrieval loses whatever the query missed. Which loss your run can survive is the whole decision — plus one rule that prevents most long-run failures.
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Reflection Loops Are Not Free: When Self-Critique Makes the Output Worse
A critique step can only catch what was already derivable from the context — and asked to find problems, a model will find them in passages that were fine. Here's when the pattern earns its doubled token bill.
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Why Your Agent Stops Too Early: The Missing Termination Signal
"Done" in most agent loops means the model stopped asking for tools — indistinguishable from stuck, confused, or bored. Making completion an explicit, validated claim takes about twenty lines.
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Your Tool Description Is a Prompt: Rewriting Schemas the Model Can Actually Follow
A three-word tool description sent an inbox agent after the wrong thread. Tool specs live inside the prompt, and five specific rewrites to yours will fix more wrong calls than any system-prompt rule.