#tutorial
Every post tagged "tutorial".
92 posts · showing 31–40
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The Cost of Choosing Your Model Too Early
The choice is rarely the mistake — the accumulated compensations are. Prompts absorb quirks, the harness papers over weaknesses, and none of it looks like coupling until you try to change something.
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Matching Model Tier to Task: A Practical Table
"Simpler tasks get cheaper models" isn't actionable, because simplicity isn't the predictor. Two properties are — and one row of the table overrides all the others.
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What "Agents Got Better" Would Actually Look Like in Your System
Waiting for agents to improve without deciding what improvement looks like makes the waiting unfalsifiable. Write the threshold down first, and every release becomes a measurement instead of a vibe.
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Debugging Code You Didn't Write and Don't Understand
The instinct is to hand the failure back to the agent. Without a reproduction that produces a plausible fix to a plausible cause — and two rounds later nobody understands the module at all.
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Autonomous Refactors: What Makes One Safe Enough to Merge
Refactoring is what agents do best and what most easily produces an unreviewable disaster — for the same reason. One property separates the two, and it isn't how hard the change looks.
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Half the Job Is a Real Answer: Designing for Partial Success
Thirty-one of forty invoices reconciled. Reporting success hides nine; reporting failure throws away thirty-one. The middle is where most runs land, and most designs can't express it.
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From Prompt Edit to Signal in Under a Minute
A six-minute iteration buys you ten experiments a day; a thirty-second one buys a hundred. Four fixes, about an afternoon of work, and the seam that everything else depends on.
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One Query Is Rarely Enough: Iterative Retrieval for Agents
The search wasn't broken — it answered the question as typed, which isn't the question that was asked. Making retrieval a tool the agent calls repeatedly needs one signal most retrievers refuse to give.
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Designing the First Turn: What Happens Before Any Tool Call
Everything after it inherits the frame it sets. Four things belong in turn one — and when a run fails at turn twelve, this is usually where the defect was introduced.
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Running Agents on a Schedule: What Changes Without a User
An agent someone triggers has a safety property nobody designs for: a person is watching. Put it on a schedule and that goes away — along with the feedback loop that was catching the errors.