#intermediate
Every post tagged "intermediate".
222 posts · showing 1–10
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The Analytics Agent Answered "What Was Q3 Revenue?" From a Deprecated Table. Make It Name Its Source Before Its Number.
The SQL was valid, the arithmetic was right, and the number was still wrong, because the agent picked the table whose name looked most like the question. Here is how to make a data agent commit to a source you can check before it hands anyone a figure.
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The Invoice Tool Timed Out, So the Billing Agent Called It Again. The Customer Was Charged Twice. A Timeout Is Not a Failure.
A timeout tells the agent it stopped waiting, not that nothing happened. Here is how a reasonable-looking retry turned into a double charge, and the idempotency key that makes the retry safe.
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Your Research Agent Scored 100% on Citations. The Grader Only Checked That a Source Was Attached.
An eval that has never failed anything is not proof of a good agent. Before you trust a grader's score, feed it answers you know are wrong and see if it notices.
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The Tax Agent's Workers Counted March Twice and Skipped Late June. Make Every Delegation Return the Range It Actually Covered.
Splitting a year of transactions across four workers looks like clean delegation until the merged total is off and every worker reports success. The fix is a coverage contract the supervisor checks before it adds anything up.
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The Travel Agent Reviewed Its Itinerary Three Times and Approved the Wrong Date Every Time. Reflection Needs Something to Check Against.
A self-review loop that reads only its own draft can polish the wrong answer forever. The fix is to give the critic something the generator never had: the original request, a fresh context, or a tool that can say no.
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Your Support Agent Still Remembers the Customer Who Was Furious in March. Decide What Memory Expires Before You Decide What It Stores.
Cross-session memory fails less often from forgetting than from remembering too long. A four-class expiry scheme for support agents, and the one field every stored memory needs.
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The Expense Agent Logged "Rate limit exceeded" as a Vendor Name. Make Tool Errors Impossible to Mistake for Results.
When a tool returns its failure as a plain string, the model reads it like any other output and carries on. The fix lives in the tool's return shape, not in the prompt.
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Your Coding Agent Hit Its Cost Cap Mid-Refactor and Left Nothing Behind. Reserve the Last Fifth of the Budget for the Handoff.
A hard spend cap protects your bill, but when it trips mid-task it throws away everything the agent learned. Split the budget into phases so the run always ends with a usable handoff instead of a dead process.
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The Refund Tool Capped Each Refund at $500. The Support Agent Issued Eleven $490 Refunds to One Customer.
A per-call limit only answers "is this action too big?" Agents fail on a different question: "is this sequence too big?" Here is how a guardrail that never fired still let the money leave, and the ledger check that would have stopped it.
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Adopt the Agent Framework or Write the Loop Yourself? Count the Defaults You'd Have to Override
Framework feature lists don't settle this choice. What settles it is how many of the framework's hidden defaults your agent would have to fight, and a short audit on one real task tells you before you commit.