#reliability
Every post tagged "reliability".
124 posts · showing 101–110
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Observability for Agents: What to Log Beyond the Trace
A trace explains one run and nothing about your system. The two layers above it — run records and aggregates — plus three agent-specific signals that standard APM will never suggest.
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Chunking for Agents Is Not Chunking for Search
Search results are read by a person who fills in the gaps. An agent doesn't — it acts on the fragment. That one difference changes how you chunk, how many you return, and what "no results" should mean.
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Agents That Wait: Callbacks, Webhooks, and Long-Running Tools
A twenty-minute export breaks the assumption that tools return quickly. Handles, in-loop polling, and true suspension — plus the expiry field that stops suspended runs leaking forever.
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Why Two Identical Runs Give Different Answers
Same input, different result. Four things cause it, only one is a bug — and the most common culprit is that the input wasn't actually identical.
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The Data-Cleaning Agent and the Column It Silently Dropped
It normalized the phone numbers, standardized the country codes, and quietly deleted 412 rows that looked untidy. Any task phrased as "make this better" reads as permission to remove what doesn't fit.
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Designing a Kill Switch That Works Mid-Run
Killing the process leaves side effects in an unknown state. A stop that works checks between steps — before every model call and before every tool call — and the difference matters most at 2am.
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Building an Eval Set From Production Traces
Hand-written cases test what you thought of. A user rephrasing the same request three times is a labelled failure sitting in your logs — here's how to turn a week of traces into a suite that catches the real ones.
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Run, Session, or Global? Scoping Agent Memory Correctly
Too-small a scope produces a visible annoyance; too-large produces a silent wrong answer. One question assigns any fact correctly, and one rule keeps multi-tenant reads from becoming an incident.
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The Escalation Path Is Part of the Design
An agent with no defined way to stop will improvise one, and its improvisation is a confident answer. Escalation deserves a tool, a destination, and a metric — and one field that stops the human starting over.
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Format Tool Output for a Model, Not for a Log File
A bare empty array means "none exist" and "we couldn't check" at the same time, and the agent will pick the confident reading. Six changes to what your handlers return, in order of payoff.