#reliability
Every post tagged "reliability".
124 posts · showing 41–50
-
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.
-
Your 95% Step Accuracy Is a 60% Agent
Compounding explains part of the gap between a green eval dashboard and a broken agent. The rest is that per-step scoring counts a step as correct when it succeeds on a premise that was already wrong.
-
The First Hour of an Agent Incident
Nothing crashed, no alert fired, and a customer just forwarded a policy answer your support agent invented. The hardest question in the first hour isn't what broke — it's when it started.
-
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.
-
Handing an Agent a PDF: Three Paths Into the Context
A PDF never enters a context window — something derived from it does. The counterparty name right and the date wrong usually means the document took the wrong path in.
-
Designing an Agent You Can Redirect Mid-Run
Twelve files into forty, you realize the approach is wrong. Let it finish or kill it — both bad, and the third option had to be designed in before the run started.
-
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.
-
Three Ways to Get Valid JSON, and What Each One Costs
The retry loop was working and quietly biased: the tickets needing three attempts weren't a random sample, and their eventual valid output was thinner than the truth.
-
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.
-
Choosing Your First Three Tools
Find, read, finish. The third one is the one people leave out, and it's the one that turns "the agent stopped talking" into something you can actually check.