#beginner
Every post tagged "beginner".
42 posts · showing 11–20
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Who Decides the Agent Is Done? Three Stop Conditions, and Why "The Model Said So" Isn't One
Most first agents end their loop when the model stops calling tools — which means the model, not you, decides what "done" means. Here are the three stop conditions a real loop needs, and the twenty lines that turn a silent wrong answer into another iteration.
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Read, Draft, Send: Where to Draw the Permission Line in a Personal Email Agent
Most email agents get permissions wrong by granting them per tool. The safer line runs through the arguments — who the recipient is, how many there are, and whether the thread was already open.
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Extraction Was Never the Hard Part: An Invoice Agent, Rebuilt
The first version had the model read invoices and type the numbers. The rebuild started after the numbers were already read — which is where the actual work in accounts payable has always been.
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Four Tool Calls to One Answer: A Research Run, Annotated
A research agent answers one question in four steps. Reading what changed in the transcript between each step explains more about how agents work than any diagram of the loop.
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Should Your Agent Remember That, or Just Look It Up Again?
Two questions sort every fact an agent encounters into "write it down" or "fetch it fresh" — and getting the sort wrong is how an assistant ends up confidently quoting a meeting that moved last week.
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Handing an Agent a PDF: Three Paths Into the Context
A PDF never enters a context window — something derived from it does. The counterparty name right and the date wrong usually means the document took the wrong path in.
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Choosing Your First Three Tools
Find, read, finish. The third one is the one people leave out, and it's the one that turns "the agent stopped talking" into something you can actually check.
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The Timeout That Looked Like an Empty Result
The health check timed out, the handler returned an empty list, and the agent reported all clear while two services were down. An empty result and a failed check must not share a shape.
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Agent Vocabulary: What the Terms Actually Mean
People discussing the same word are frequently discussing different things. Four of the distinctions are load-bearing — and when an agent conversation isn't converging, it's usually one of them.
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The First Agent to Deploy in a Company That Has None
The first one shapes how much latitude every later one gets. Which means the right choice usually isn't the most valuable use case — it's the one most likely to succeed where people can see it.