#agent-design
Every post tagged "agent-design".
112 posts · showing 81–90
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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.
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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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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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Agents That Wait: Callbacks, Webhooks, and Long-Running Tools
A twenty-minute export breaks the assumption that tools return quickly. Handles, in-loop polling, and true suspension — plus the expiry field that stops suspended runs leaking forever.
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Fan-Out, Fan-In: Parallelism Inside a Single Agent
Twelve independent checks shouldn't cost twelve turns, each re-sending the whole context. Three levels of parallelism inside one agent — and the fan-in is where the pattern usually goes wrong.
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When the Worker Needs to Ask the Supervisor a Question
A blocked worker with no channel back will guess, and the guess is invisible in what it returns. Making "needs input" a result type costs nothing — and the questions it logs are a to-do list for your delegation template.
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Model Routing: Using the Cheap Model for the Cheap Steps
Classification, extraction, and formatting move to a cheaper tier safely. Tool selection and planning don't — and the failure looks like a tool-description bug, so you'll debug the wrong thing for a week.
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Run, Session, or Global? Scoping Agent Memory Correctly
Too-small a scope produces a visible annoyance; too-large produces a silent wrong answer. One question assigns any fact correctly, and one rule keeps multi-tenant reads from becoming an incident.