#debugging
Every post tagged "debugging".
34 posts · showing 21–30
-
Your First Agent: Build the Smallest Useful One
Three read-only tools, sixty lines of loop, and the raw array printed every turn. Then break it on purpose — a failing tool teaches more in five minutes than a week of building the complicated version.
-
Shared Tool Access: When Two Agents Touch the Same Resource
An agent holds a stale read for seconds, not microseconds — long enough that last-write-wins silently deletes another agent's work while both report success. Partition, append, or version.
-
Bisecting a Bad Run: Finding the Change That Broke It
It worked last week. Six things could have changed, and they vary independently — so bisect across the dimensions first, then within one. And diff the raw arrays for what's missing, not what's different.
-
Observability for Agents: What to Log Beyond the Trace
A trace explains one run and nothing about your system. The two layers above it — run records and aggregates — plus three agent-specific signals that standard APM will never suggest.
-
Why Two Identical Runs Give Different Answers
Same input, different result. Four things cause it, only one is a bug — and the most common culprit is that the input wasn't actually identical.
-
Building an Eval Set From Production Traces
Hand-written cases test what you thought of. A user rephrasing the same request three times is a labelled failure sitting in your logs — here's how to turn a week of traces into a suite that catches the real ones.
-
The Agent That Read Page 1 of 40: Pagination in Tool Design
It reported three overdue invoices. There were sixty-one. The tool worked as documented — which is exactly why this bug is so common and so quiet.
-
Flaky Agents: Separating Model Nondeterminism From Your Bugs
A test passed on re-run. That's ambiguous for agents in a way it isn't for other software — and the fix is to stop reporting pass/fail and start reporting distributions.
-
Reading Your First Agent Trace: Wrong Tool, Wrong Argument, or Wrong Plan?
Four buckets, checked in order, and most agent failures resolve before you get to the interesting one. The trick is finding the first wrong turn and reading the raw array — not the pretty rendering.
-
The Planner That Plans Too Much: When Upfront Decomposition Hurts
An agent found the root cause in step one and executed the remaining seven steps anyway. Plans in context outweigh the evidence that should kill them — unless revision is something the loop can actually do.