#ai-agents
Every post tagged "ai-agents".
303 posts · showing 21–30
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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 Assistant Still Thinks You're Vegetarian Because of One Dinner Party. Build the Memory Write Gate Before the Retriever.
Most agent memory bugs are write bugs: a one-off remark gets stored as a permanent fact, and no retriever can fix what should never have been saved. Here is a four-question gate that decides what goes in, with scope, provenance and an expiry on every entry.
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The Refund Tool Timed Out, the Agent Retried, and the Customer Got Paid Twice. Make Every Write Tool Idempotent.
A timeout tells the agent nothing about whether the write happened, and a retry is its most reasonable next move. The fix belongs in the tool, not in the prompt.
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Before You Adopt an Agent Framework, Try to Break Its Loop: Four Escape Hatches You'll Need by Week Three
Time-to-demo is the one framework criterion that stops mattering the moment you ship. Four seams to test in an afternoon — and the production incident each one predicts.
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The Analytics Agent Said Revenue Was Up 38%. The Join Had Counted Every Order Once Per Line Item.
A text-to-SQL agent that answers with a single number has hidden the one thing a reviewer needed to see. Here is how a fan-out join slipped through, and the grain checks that would have caught it before anyone got to the slide.
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The Agent Said It Booked the Meeting. Learn to Read One Turn: Text, Tool Call, Tool Result, and Which One Counts
An agent's reply can describe an action it never took. Once you can tell the three kinds of message in a transcript apart, you will know in ten seconds whether the calendar invite exists.
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Parallel Subagents or One Agent in Sequence? Check Whether the Subtasks Share a Write
Fanning a task out to five workers looks five times faster, until two of them update the same record and the last write quietly wins. One question about shared writes settles most parallel-vs-sequential calls.
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Your Agent Works in the Demo Because You're Watching: Six Failures That Only Appear at 3 A.M.
A live demo isn't a smaller version of production — it's a different environment with a human silently patching over every gap. Here are the six failure classes that only wake up once that human goes to bed.
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The Agent Got the Right Answer by the Wrong Route. Score the Trajectory, and Know the Three Cases Where the Answer Is Enough
A final-answer eval passes an agent that guessed, one that ran a write query mid-task, and one that took forty steps to do the job in four. Here is how to assert on the path without freezing a golden trace, and when you can safely skip it.
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Summarising the Conversation Threw Away the One ID the Next Tool Call Needed. Summarise Prose, Never Identifiers.
Context compaction reads fine to a human and breaks the agent anyway: the summary kept the story and lost the order number. The fix is to stop asking a summariser to carry identifiers at all.