#intermediate
Every post tagged "intermediate".
223 posts · showing 51–60
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Green Evals, Broken Production: The Frozen Fixture Problem
An eval suite built on recorded tool responses stops testing your agent and starts testing a museum. Here are three cheap detectors for fixture rot — and the rule for when a case should call the live tool instead.
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What Should Your Agent Forget? Give Every Memory an Expiry Rule
Agent memory systems have a write verb and a recall verb, but no verb for "stop believing this." Here's how to decide at write time what makes each memory stop being true — and why expiry should downgrade a fact rather than delete it.
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The Worker Agent Reported Success. Where Should the Check Live?
A worker agent's "done" is a sentence, not evidence — and in effectful work the gap between the two is where silent failures live. Three places to put the verification, and the one most teams pick that buys nothing.
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How Should a Team Review a Tool Description Diff? Treat It Like a Schema Migration
A six-word edit to a tool description is a behavior change with no compiler to catch it. Borrowing the review checklist teams already use for schema migrations turns an unreviewable prose diff into something you can actually approve.
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Retry, Reroute, or Hand Back: Budgeting an Agent's Second Chances
A tool call fails and the loop tries again — five times, forty seconds, and still nothing usable for the user. Retrying is only one of three legal responses, and picking the wrong one turns a fast failure into an expensive one.
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When Memory Contradicts the Tool Call, Which One Does the Agent Believe?
An agent had the live billing data and a three-week-old memory in the same context window, and answered from the memory. The reason isn't retrieval — it's how prompts are assembled, and there are three specific fixes.
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The Tool Returned 200 and Nothing Happened
A calendar agent reported success on a meeting that landed at 3am, on the wrong calendar, with no invitation sent. The API did exactly what it was asked — and the return value gave the agent no way to know.
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Where Should the Agent Loop Live? Framework, Job Queue, or Workflow Engine
The choice isn't about which framework has the nicer API. It's about what a crash at step six costs — and durable execution engines carry a constraint that fights the way agents are written.
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Read-Only Was Never the Same as Safe
SELECT-only credentials close exactly one of the four ways an analytics agent can hurt you. The other three don't require the ability to write anything to the database at all.
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The Supervisor That Should Have Been a For-Loop
Every night the same plan, a model call per dispatch, and about once a week it checked eleven services instead of twelve. A for-loop cannot skip an item; an agent orchestrating one eventually will.