#intermediate
Every post tagged "intermediate".
222 posts · showing 171–180
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The Documentation Agent That Actually Kept Docs in Sync
Ask an agent "do the docs need updating?" on every PR and you get noise reviewers close unread. Trigger on contract changes, forbid new prose, cite the source line — and run the corpus-wide contradiction check first.
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Audit Logs That Survive an Incident
Audit logs get designed for compliance and used during incidents. One question — who caused what, to whom, under what authority — decides every field, and most logs can't answer the authority part.
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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.
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Pricing an Agent Product When Your Costs Are Variable
One customer can cost a hundred times another on the same plan, and they're often the ones getting the most value. Five pricing models, their failure modes, and the trap where every quality improvement cuts your margin.
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Delegating to a Human as If They Were an Agent
Same interface, same contract, same result shape — a person is a worker with hours of latency and much better context. Which makes suspendable runs the prerequisite, not a nice-to-have.
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The File System as a Tool: Underrated Agent Infrastructure
Four hundred thousand rows won't fit in a context window; a path and a preview cost nothing. A scoped directory solves large results, durable state, and reviewable artifacts at once — if you resolve paths correctly.
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Give the Agent a Scratchpad: External Working Memory
Three small tools stop the context from being the only place findings can live. Compaction stops being lossy, long runs stop growing, and you get a readable record instead of a forty-turn transcript.
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Treating Prompts Like Code: Versioning, Review, and Rollback
A one-line edit in a web console changes behavior across every request, with no history and no way back. Prompts in the repo, rendered hashes in the logs, eval results in the PR — and a quarterly prune.
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The Verifier in the Loop: Designing an Oracle Your Agent Can Iterate Against
Coding agents work as well as they do because compilers exist. In other domains the oracle is something you build — and most tasks have one hiding in them if you spend ten minutes looking.
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Where Agents Don't Belong (Yet)
Six task shapes where the agent architecture is the wrong fit regardless of model quality — each with a tell you can check in an afternoon, before committing a quarter to it.