#intermediate
Every post tagged "intermediate".
223 posts · showing 41–50
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Your First Production Agent Should Be Invoice Reconciliation — Because the Ledger Grades It for You
The best first agent isn't the most impressive one — it's the one whose environment tells you when it's wrong. Here's how to score candidate tasks for a built-in oracle, and the two ways that oracle quietly lies to you.
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Framework or Raw SDK? The Test Is Whether You Can Print the Exact Prompt
The framework debate is usually argued on taste. There's a faster test: build a two-tool agent and try to dump the exact request it sends on turn four. How hard that is predicts your next six months of debugging.
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Your Eval Ran Each Case Once. That's Why It Missed the Flake.
A forty-case suite can pass every case and still hide a bug that reaches users one week in five. The number missing from most agent evals isn't coverage — it's how many times you ran each case.
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Your Two Reviewer Agents Disagree. Who Breaks the Tie?
Running the same document past two agents is easy. Deciding what happens when they return opposite verdicts is the part most multi-agent designs quietly leave undefined — and the default resolution is usually the worst one available.
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Cached or Re-Called? Giving Every Agent Tool a Staleness Budget
An agent that reads a value once and acts on it four minutes later isn't reasoning badly — nobody told it how long that value stays true. Per-tool staleness budgets, and the one rule that matters most before a write.
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One Worker Pool or Two? Separating Fast Agent Runs From Slow Ones
A handful of long research runs can starve hundreds of eight-second ticket replies without a single error firing. The fix isn't more workers — it's deciding, at admission, which lane a run belongs in.
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Your Agent Retried the Tool Call. The Customer Got Charged Twice.
A timed-out tool call is not a failed one — it is an unknown one. Here is why "just retry" quietly doubles real-world side effects, and where to put the idempotency check so it cannot.
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Your Agents Asked 40 Questions This Week. Which Ones Should Have Reached a Human?
Human attention is the one resource in an agent deployment that never shows up on the bill — so agents spend it freely. Here's a three-way routing rule, a threshold you can actually tune, and the two metrics that tell you when your agent is asking too much or too little.
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Map-Reduce or Sequential Refine? How an Agent Should Read 400 Pages
Chunking 400 pages of contracts forces a choice most teams make by accident. One shape quietly drops evidence as it goes; the other can never spot a conflict between two documents — and the fix is not the pattern, it's what the map step returns.
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Draining a Data Backlog: Should the Agent Batch Rows or Take Them One at a Time?
The ratio of preamble tokens to row tokens decides whether chunking a backlog saves an order of magnitude or nothing at all — and it's the alignment, retry amplification and blast radius that decide whether you should anyway.