#intermediate
Every post tagged "intermediate".
222 posts · showing 201–210
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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.
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What Breaks First When You Give an Agent a Browser
Six failures, in the order they arrive: the page isn't what you think it is, selectors rot, state assumptions break silently, and the session carries more authority than the task needs.
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One Prompt Per Job Beats One Prompt For All: The Router Pattern
Every new case adds a paragraph, and adherence to all of them drops. Classify first and run a small prompt built for that class — with per-route tools, limits, and approval policy.
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The Skill Agents Erode Fastest: Reading Unfamiliar Code
Delegating code traversal is pure gain. Delegating comprehension means not having the model — and review quality is bounded by the model you don't have.
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Build or Buy the Eval Harness? What Each Choice Locks In
Teams buy an eval platform and keep their own scripts anyway. The reason is deterministic replay — it hooks into your dispatch layer, which is the one part no vendor can own.
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The Research Agent That Cited the Wrong Page
Every source was real and had been read. Two citations still pointed at the wrong page — one at a source that disagreed. Attribution is a lookup, and generation isn't a lookup.
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Where to Put the Approval: Human-in-the-Loop Is a Design, Not a Checkbox
A confirm dialog nobody reads has all the latency of oversight and none of the protection. Four placements, a routing rule based on reversibility, and the metric that tells you your gate has become a rubber stamp.
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What Belongs in Long-Term Memory (and What's Just Transcript)
Embedding every turn gives you a transcript with a search box, not memory. Three categories deserve to outlive a conversation — and the contradiction problem needs deciding before it arrives, not after.
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One Search Tool or Five? Getting Tool Granularity Right
Five narrow search tools or one with filters? The choice doesn't remove errors, it relocates them — and one of the two places is much cheaper to defend.
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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.