#agent-design
Every post tagged "agent-design".
112 posts · showing 11–20
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One Tool With Twelve Parameters or Four With Three? Let the Agent's Error Log Decide
Merging tools trades wrong-tool mistakes for wrong-argument mistakes. Your traces already show which one your agent makes more, and an overloaded tool leaves a signature you can grep for.
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An Agent That Cannot Fail Will Retry Forever. Budget Tokens and Wall-Clock, Not Retry Counts.
Your max_retries=3 never fires, because every search call succeeds. The agent just keeps finding new ways to look for an answer that doesn't exist. Here is the budget that actually stops it, and the exit that lets it stop politely.
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Forty Tools in One Prompt: What It Actually Costs, and the Three Signals That Say Split the Agent
Forty registered tools do not fail loudly — the agent just gets vague, picking near-synonyms and asking questions it had the answer to. Here are the three costs you're paying, and the signals in your traces that tell you to merge, gate, or finally split.
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Your Agent Called the Same Tool Three Times in a Row. Here's What the Loop Is Telling You.
A repeating agent isn't being stubborn — it's being consistent. Identical tool calls mean the context barely changed between turns, and there are only four reasons that happens.
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"Done" Is Not a Handback: What a Worker Agent Should Actually Return to Its Supervisor
A worker agent reporting "completed" tells its supervisor nothing it can verify. Here is the handback shape that makes a fabricated result catchable by code instead of by a second model's opinion.
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Your Tool Returned 4,000 Rows and the Agent Needed Three: Truncate, Paginate, or Summarize?
Most tool endpoints were written for a caller that can loop and discard. An agent reads the whole response in one gulp and keeps it forever — and the three ways of shrinking that response fail in completely different ways.
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Append or Supersede? What to Do When New Information Contradicts Agent Memory
Most agent memory systems only know how to add. The moment a fact changes, the store holds both versions and the retriever picks whichever one scores higher — which is why a scheduling agent keeps booking a room that was decommissioned last month.
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Retry, Repair, or Replan? A Recovery Ladder for When an Agent's Step Fails
Blind retry burns money on a call that will never succeed; premature replanning throws away correct work and produces a worse plan. The deciding signal isn't how bad the error looks — it's what the error proves false.
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Agent or Just a Script? Count the Branches That Depend on Reading Something
There is a ten-minute test that settles whether your automation needs an agent loop or just a script with a couple of model calls in the middle — and the two ways of guessing wrong are not equally recoverable.
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Your Two Reviewer Agents Disagree. Who Breaks the Tie?
Running the same document past two agents is easy. Deciding what happens when they return opposite verdicts is the part most multi-agent designs quietly leave undefined — and the default resolution is usually the worst one available.