#intermediate
Every post tagged "intermediate".
223 posts · showing 61–70
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Was It Retrieval or Reasoning? Diagnosing a Wrong Answer
A day spent rewriting the prompt for a wrong policy answer, when the policy document was never retrieved. Three checks in the right order, and one log field that separates "ignored it" from "never saw it."
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The Screening Agent That Could Only Be Right
Every available metric said it was working — and every one of them was computed only from the candidates it advanced. The decision destroys the evidence needed to evaluate the decision.
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Test the Tool or Test the Agent? What Each Layer Catches
Sort a month of eval failures by root cause and most turn out to be tool contract bugs — findable in milliseconds by a unit test, currently being caught by the slowest instrument you own.
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Injection That Crosses a Handoff
The fetcher had no write tools and the analyst never saw a web page. The separation held perfectly — and routed the payload around itself, through the one field that carries prose.
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When a Worker Returns Garbage: Validating at the Handoff
Thirty-nine extracts were fine. The fortieth had every field present, correctly typed, and null — and the supervisor aggregated it, because well-formed looked like correct.
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What Ten Years of Agent Tooling Might Look Like
Specific capability predictions age badly; layer predictions age better. Which parts commoditize, which stay differentiated — and the one prediction here most likely to be wrong.
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The Skills That Were Always the Job
Almost nothing on the durable list is new. These are what experienced engineers always said mattered — the economics just didn't reward them proportionately until now.
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Positions Worth Revising About Agents
Eight beliefs that are reasonable on their face and don't survive production. Every correction points the same direction — which makes it a useful prior for the next problem.
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Reading the Agent Discourse Without Being Misled
Two questions handle most of it: what specifically was the input, and what specifically checked the output? Almost every overstated claim is weak on one of them.
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The Second-System Effect in Agent Deployments
The first agent works because it was scoped well. The second aims at exactly the cases the first one escalated — which is the residual that resisted automation for structural reasons.