#intermediate
Every post tagged "intermediate".
222 posts · showing 21–30
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Before You Adopt an Agent Framework, Try to Break Its Loop: Four Escape Hatches You'll Need by Week Three
Time-to-demo is the one framework criterion that stops mattering the moment you ship. Four seams to test in an afternoon — and the production incident each one predicts.
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The Analytics Agent Said Revenue Was Up 38%. The Join Had Counted Every Order Once Per Line Item.
A text-to-SQL agent that answers with a single number has hidden the one thing a reviewer needed to see. Here is how a fan-out join slipped through, and the grain checks that would have caught it before anyone got to the slide.
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Parallel Subagents or One Agent in Sequence? Check Whether the Subtasks Share a Write
Fanning a task out to five workers looks five times faster, until two of them update the same record and the last write quietly wins. One question about shared writes settles most parallel-vs-sequential calls.
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Your Agent Works in the Demo Because You're Watching: Six Failures That Only Appear at 3 A.M.
A live demo isn't a smaller version of production — it's a different environment with a human silently patching over every gap. Here are the six failure classes that only wake up once that human goes to bed.
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Summarising the Conversation Threw Away the One ID the Next Tool Call Needed. Summarise Prose, Never Identifiers.
Context compaction reads fine to a human and breaks the agent anyway: the summary kept the story and lost the order number. The fix is to stop asking a summariser to carry identifiers at all.
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One Tool With Twelve Parameters or Four With Three? Let the Agent's Error Log Decide
Merging tools trades wrong-tool mistakes for wrong-argument mistakes. Your traces already show which one your agent makes more, and an overloaded tool leaves a signature you can grep for.
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Retrieval Returned Zero Rows and the Agent Cited a Policy Doc Anyway
Empty retrieval results are the only tool failure that arrives as a success — status 200, results [] — and a model asked to answer from sources will invent one to fill the hole. Two boundary fixes: a loud typed empty, and citation IDs validated in code.
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A Second Pass That Asks the Same Question Finds the Same Bugs. Change the Unit, Not the Temperature.
Raising the temperature on a review pass re-rolls the dice inside a frame that has already decided what is findable. Three properties determine what a pass can see, and a real second pass has to change at least two of them.
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Forty Tools in One Prompt: What It Actually Costs, and the Three Signals That Say Split the Agent
Forty registered tools do not fail loudly — the agent just gets vague, picking near-synonyms and asking questions it had the answer to. Here are the three costs you're paying, and the signals in your traces that tell you to merge, gate, or finally split.
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A 1% Flaky Tool Shouldn't Take You Down. Three Nested Retry Layers Will.
A tool that fails one call in a hundred is healthy. The retry logic wrapped around it is what turns a dependency's bad minute into a queue of hung user requests — and the load multiplier is at its worst exactly when the dependency is weakest.