#agentic-ai
Every post tagged "agentic-ai".
27 posts · showing 1–10
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Your Agent Fleet Kept Its Own Quota Pinned for Forty Minutes: Synchronised Retries Are a Self-Inflicted Outage
The provider rejected one batch of calls; the fleet turned that into forty minutes of self-inflicted downtime. Why exponential backoff alone makes synchronised retries worse, the sub-second signal that exposes it, and the three-part fix that actually breaks the loop.
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The Tool Call Failed on Step 3. Retry, Skip, or Replan? Decide by What the Failure Told You About the Plan.
A failed tool call carries two facts: the action didn't happen, and something you believed may be false. Agents act on the first and throw away the second — here's the one question that sorts retry from skip from replan, and how to put the answer in the error contract instead of the prompt.
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Your Agent Asks Permission Nine Times an Hour, So Nobody Reads the Prompts Any More. Spend a Fixed Approval Budget.
Every confirmation dialog you add makes the next one less effective. Here's how to classify write actions by reversibility and reach, auto-allow the safe corner, and reserve the human's attention for the handful of actions that can't be undone.
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Your Critic Agent Approves Everything Because It Read the Worker's Reasoning. Starve It of the Argument, Give It Its Own Evidence.
Forward the worker's transcript to your reviewer agent and it will approve nearly everything — anchored by a conclusion it treats as evidence. Here is the information diet, the mutation test, and the disagreement policy that turn a rubber stamp back into a check.
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A Second Pass That Asks the Same Question Finds the Same Bugs. Change the Unit, Not the Temperature.
Raising the temperature on a review pass re-rolls the dice inside a frame that has already decided what is findable. Three properties determine what a pass can see, and a real second pass has to change at least two of them.
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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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Can You See the Raw Messages? The Question That Sorts Agent Frameworks
Every agent framework demos well. The one that survives your first 2am incident is the one that will hand you the exact bytes it sent to the model — and let you change them before they go.
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A Two-Line Prompt Diff Is a Behavior Change. Here's the Regression Check It Needs.
A prompt edit has the blast radius of a code change and none of the safety rails — no compiler, no type error, no failing test. Six checks that turn a forty-second approval into a real regression gate.
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A 5% Canary Mostly Samples Your Easy Tasks. Roll Agent Upgrades Out by Task Class.
Random traffic slices sample volume, but an agent's risk lives in the thin tail of long, tool-heavy, irreversible tasks. Here's how to build a rollout ladder that samples the danger instead.
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When the Context Window Fills, Cut in This Order — and Leave a Stub Behind
Most agents evict context by dropping the oldest tokens, which reliably deletes the nine words that mattered while keeping a 4,000-token HTML dump nobody needs. Here is the order to cut in, and why every eviction should leave a stub behind.