#intermediate
Every post tagged "intermediate".
222 posts · showing 11–20
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The Analytics Agent's SQL Was Correct. It Answered a Different Question. Make It Print Its Definitions Before Its Number.
The query ran clean, the chart looked right, and the churn number went into the board deck. It counted trial accounts as customers. The fix is not better SQL; it is making the agent commit to what every word in the question means before it touches the warehouse.
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Your Assistant Agent Reads Your Inbox and Pays Your Bills. Split It Where the Permissions Change, Not Where the Topics Do.
An email agent, a calendar agent and a finance agent look like clean architecture. They leave every agent exactly as manipulable as before and add three handoffs. There is a better place to draw the line.
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The On-Call Agent Restarted the Primary Anyway. The Instruction Not To Had Been Summarised Away.
Context compaction keeps the story of a long session and quietly drops the rules. The fix is a pinned constraint block that the summariser is never allowed to touch, plus a check that proves it survived.
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Your Research Agent Passed the Eval Once. Run Every Case Five Times and Grade the Worst Run.
A single green run tells you the agent can do the task, not that it will. Repeat each eval case, split the suite into solid, flaky and broken, and the flaky bucket becomes your real to-do list.
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The Inbox Agent Said Nobody Had Replied. The Search Tool Had Returned Page One of Four.
An agent can't tell "there's nothing here" from "I only saw the first page" unless the tool tells it. Here is how to make a paginated tool announce its own incompleteness, and why claims of absence need a stricter rule than claims of presence.
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The Tool Call Failed on Step 3. Retry, Skip, or Replan? Decide by What the Failure Told You About the Plan.
A failed tool call carries two facts: the action didn't happen, and something you believed may be false. Agents act on the first and throw away the second — here's the one question that sorts retry from skip from replan, and how to put the answer in the error contract instead of the prompt.
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Your Agent Asks Permission Nine Times an Hour, So Nobody Reads the Prompts Any More. Spend a Fixed Approval Budget.
Every confirmation dialog you add makes the next one less effective. Here's how to classify write actions by reversibility and reach, auto-allow the safe corner, and reserve the human's attention for the handful of actions that can't be undone.
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Your Critic Agent Approves Everything Because It Read the Worker's Reasoning. Starve It of the Argument, Give It Its Own Evidence.
Forward the worker's transcript to your reviewer agent and it will approve nearly everything — anchored by a conclusion it treats as evidence. Here is the information diet, the mutation test, and the disagreement policy that turn a rubber stamp back into a check.
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Your Assistant Still Thinks You're Vegetarian Because of One Dinner Party. Build the Memory Write Gate Before the Retriever.
Most agent memory bugs are write bugs: a one-off remark gets stored as a permanent fact, and no retriever can fix what should never have been saved. Here is a four-question gate that decides what goes in, with scope, provenance and an expiry on every entry.
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The Refund Tool Timed Out, the Agent Retried, and the Customer Got Paid Twice. Make Every Write Tool Idempotent.
A timeout tells the agent nothing about whether the write happened, and a retry is its most reasonable next move. The fix belongs in the tool, not in the prompt.