#ai-agents
Every post tagged "ai-agents".
303 posts · showing 41–50
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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.
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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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One 300-Second Timeout Tells You Nothing. Agents Need a Deadline Budget.
A run that dies at its ceiling with no attribution tells you nothing about which part was slow — and pushes you toward the laziest fix, raising the ceiling. Three nested clocks, an inherited remainder, and a reserved tail slice turn timeouts into a signal you can actually read.
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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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Your First Production Agent Should Be Invoice Reconciliation — Because the Ledger Grades It for You
The best first agent isn't the most impressive one — it's the one whose environment tells you when it's wrong. Here's how to score candidate tasks for a built-in oracle, and the two ways that oracle quietly lies to you.
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Framework or Raw SDK? The Test Is Whether You Can Print the Exact Prompt
The framework debate is usually argued on taste. There's a faster test: build a two-tool agent and try to dump the exact request it sends on turn four. How hard that is predicts your next six months of debugging.
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Your Eval Ran Each Case Once. That's Why It Missed the Flake.
A forty-case suite can pass every case and still hide a bug that reaches users one week in five. The number missing from most agent evals isn't coverage — it's how many times you ran each case.
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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.