#intermediate
Every post tagged "intermediate".
222 posts · showing 211–220
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Streaming an Agent's Progress Without Lying About It
Token streaming goes quiet exactly when an agent gets slow — inside the tool call. The fix is an event stream from the loop, and the hard part is not inventing certainty the loop doesn't have.
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Agent Adoption Stalls at Trust, Not Capability
An agent whose errors cluster somewhere describable beats a more accurate one whose errors are scattered. Ask your users when they double-check its work — the answer is your real roadmap.
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Framework or Plain Loop? Four Questions That Actually Decide It
The core agent loop is under a hundred lines — that's never what a framework saves you. Four situational questions decide it, and the one about 3am debugging should carry the most weight.
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The Read-Only Agent That Wasn't: Auditing What Your Tools Can Actually Reach
A tool named `check_service_health` woke someone at 3am. Read-only is a claim about effects at the far end of every call, and there's a short audit that either proves it or shows you what you actually deployed.
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The Triage Agent That Should Have Been a Filter
A routing agent replaced a set of rules and made the common case slower, pricier, and less predictable. The lesson isn't "don't use agents" — it's that judgment is worth paying for only where judgment is required.
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Assert on the Trajectory, Not the Answer
A final-answer check will happily pass a run that took nineteen turns and touched a tool it should never have called. Five lines of trajectory assertions catch what output tests structurally cannot.
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Trim, Summarize, or Retrieve? Three Ways to Survive a Long Agent Run
Trimming loses the oldest information, summarizing loses specificity, retrieval loses whatever the query missed. Which loss your run can survive is the whole decision — plus one rule that prevents most long-run failures.
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Reflection Loops Are Not Free: When Self-Critique Makes the Output Worse
A critique step can only catch what was already derivable from the context — and asked to find problems, a model will find them in passages that were fine. Here's when the pattern earns its doubled token bill.
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Your Tool Description Is a Prompt: Rewriting Schemas the Model Can Actually Follow
A three-word tool description sent an inbox agent after the wrong thread. Tool specs live inside the prompt, and five specific rewrites to yours will fix more wrong calls than any system-prompt rule.
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The Supervisor That Became a Bottleneck: When Not to Add a Second Agent
Splitting a task across agents adds a boundary, and every boundary quietly drops context. Here's the test for whether your second agent is buying isolation or just paying double for a worse answer.