#tutorial
Every post tagged "tutorial".
92 posts · showing 11–20
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Agent or Just a Script? Count the Branches That Depend on Reading Something
There is a ten-minute test that settles whether your automation needs an agent loop or just a script with a couple of model calls in the middle — and the two ways of guessing wrong are not equally recoverable.
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Who Decides the Agent Is Done? Three Stop Conditions, and Why "The Model Said So" Isn't One
Most first agents end their loop when the model stops calling tools — which means the model, not you, decides what "done" means. Here are the three stop conditions a real loop needs, and the twenty lines that turn a silent wrong answer into another iteration.
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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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Let the Model Pick the Transition, Not the Tool
A returns agent that can issue a refund before it has checked eligibility will eventually do exactly that, and no amount of prompt wording reliably stops it. Making the call unavailable is a design decision, not a prompt one.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Budgeting the Context Window: Dividing a Fixed Space
The window wasn't full and the constraints still vanished — because six claimants compete for one space and nobody allocated it. Making history the residual rather than a claimant is what makes the scheme work.
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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.