#agent-design
Every post tagged "agent-design".
112 posts · showing 51–60
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The Reliability Ceiling and What Would Have to Change
98% per step sounds excellent and produces 67% on a twenty-step task. The plateau is compounding arithmetic — which means the fix is shortening the chain, not improving the steps.
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Longer Context Windows Won't Fix Long-Horizon Tasks
The premise is right — things fall out of context — and the conclusion doesn't follow. Most long-run failures aren't about storage, and a bigger window removes the discipline that was helping.
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Predicting Agent Capability: Reason From Mechanism, Not Vibes
"Will agents get better?" is the wrong question. Six things block any given task, only two of them move with model releases — and the other four are the ones nobody's working on.
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Ambiguity Resolution Stays a Human Job for a While
An agent doesn't fail on ambiguity — it absorbs it, picks a reading, and produces a confident answer to a question nobody asked. Better models guess better; they don't guess less.
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Why Agents Struggle Where There's No Feedback Signal
Coding agents work well because compilers exist, not because code is easy. Effectiveness tracks whether a domain has a fast, independent, specific verdict — and that's frequently something you can build.
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The Failure Modes That Don't Improve With Scale
Most agent limitations improve with the models. A smaller set won't, because the constraint isn't the model — and building elaborate workarounds for one while waiting out the other gets both wrong.
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Agents Are Better at Writing Code Than at Deciding What to Build
Both feel like thinking about the problem, and only one has complete inputs and a checkable answer. The reframe that makes a model genuinely useful near a decision it shouldn't be making.
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The Ticket-to-PR Agent: Which Half of the Job It Does Well
The split wasn't by difficulty — some intricate tickets went fine and some trivial ones went badly. One question predicts it, and acting on it improves something other than your agent.
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What "End-to-End Development Agent" Actually Means Right Now
The phrase covers demos that differ by orders of magnitude. Naming the eight stages shows which two are genuinely autonomous — and why chaining them is qualitatively harder than any one of them.
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Raw SQL or Curated Queries? Giving an Agent Your Database
A two-line tool description can hand an agent unbounded access to your data and your query planner. The guardrails matter more than the choice — and one cheap planner call prevents most of the damage.