All 45 articles, sorted alphabetically
Agent Evaluation at Scale
From spot checks to continuous monitoring: trace capture and replay, LLM judges with calibration, drift detection, reliable eval datasets, CI/CD metri…
Read article →Agent Memory Layers Compared
Working, episodic, semantic — what to persist where. Three tiers of agent memory, from the live context window to long-term facts, and why each tier m…
Read article →Agent Skill Anti-Patterns: Scope Creep, False Positives, and Prompt Bloat
What actually goes wrong with agent skills in practice: descriptions broad enough to cause false-positive matches, a single skill trying to do too muc…
Read article →Agent Skills Architecture: Decoupling What an Agent Does from How It Runs
Deep-dive on the agent skill pattern: a portable, inert instruction file that decouples an agent's behavior from its runtime, why that de…
Read article →Skill Discovery and Retrieval: How an Agent Runtime Picks the Right Skill
Deep-dive on how an agent runtime matches an incoming request against a catalog of skill description fields: embedding similarity vs. LLM-as-router vs…
Read article →Skills vs. Tools vs. Fine-Tuning: Where Each Actually Belongs
A decision framework for choosing between a skill (in-context instructions), a tool (a callable function with a schema), and fine-tuning (a weight-lev…
Read article →Capability Fallback Chains: What an Agent Does When Its Best Tool Isn't Available
Designing explicit fallback chains for agents when a primary tool, model, or skill is unavailable -- specialist tool to generic tool to human -- why s…
Read article →Observability and Tracing for Agentic Systems
Distributed tracing across a multi-step, multi-model agent pipeline: a span per LLM call and per tool call, parent-child relationships across a plan-e…
Read article →Permission Boundaries for Autonomous Agents: Capability Scoping, Not Just Auth
The difference between authenticating an agent and scoping what a specific agent run is allowed to do right now: least-privilege per-task credentials …
Read article →The Skill Registry Pattern for Multi-Agent Fleets
Deep-dive on sharing a common skill catalog across a fleet of agents: central registry versus per-agent local copies, how an agent advertises which sk…
Read article →Testing Agent Skills Before They Reach Production: A Validation Framework
A validation framework for agent skill files specifically: golden-example test sets, regression testing on skill edits, catching the false-positive pr…
Read article →Choosing Your Agentic Stack: A Decision Framework
A practical framework for picking an orchestration framework, memory/vector store, observability tooling, and context/RAG library together as a cohere…
Read article →Context and RAG Tooling for Agents
Comparing LlamaIndex, LangChain, and Haystack as libraries for building an agent's retrieval and context-assembly layer -- what each is a…
Read article →Memory and Vector Store Options for Agentic Systems
Comparing pgvector, managed vector databases, and self-hosted open-source vector databases for agent memory -- operational trade-offs, and the specifi…
Read article →Observability Tooling for Agents
Comparing purpose-built LLM/agent observability platforms against a custom OpenTelemetry-based tracer -- what each captures, and when off-the-shelf to…
Read article →The Agentic Orchestration Stack Compared
Comparing LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, and Google's ADK by core design philosophy -- explicit state graph vs. role-based crew vs. conversa…
Read article →Agent checkpointing
Deep-dive on checkpointing long-running agents: write-ahead event logs at step boundaries, snapshot-plus-tail resume, idempotency keys and reconciliat…
Read article →Context compaction for long-running agents
Deep-dive on context compaction: keeping a long agent session inside the context window by summarizing settled history rather than truncating it. Cove…
Read article →Context engineering architecture
Deep-dive on context engineering for agents: per-turn token budgets, history windowing and commitment-preserving compaction, tool-result hygiene and a…
Read article →Agent cost optimization -- controlling the token bill
Deep-dive on agent cost optimization: why agents are token-hungry (loops, growing context), the cost drivers, model routing, context management, promp…
Read article →Agent guardrails
Deep-dive on agent guardrails: input/output/action/budget control points, deterministic vs LLM-based checks, fail modes (block/warn/escalate), defense…
Read article →Human-in-the-loop -- humans and agents collaborating
Deep-dive on human-in-the-loop agents: approval gates, escalation, review/correction, and confidence-based involvement, interaction patterns (sync/asy…
Read article →Multi-Agent Orchestration Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of multi-agent orchestration: supervisor, workers, shared memory, message bus, budgets, and human-in-the-loop.
Read article →Agent output verification architecture
Deep-dive on verifying agent outputs before acting: structure, grounding, and policy layers; deterministic rules vs LLM-as-judge; the pass/repair/reje…
Read article →Agent planner architecture
Deep-dive on agent planner architecture: the reflection loop with state store, memory, guardrails, and observability.
Read article →Agent Planning Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of agent planning: task prompt, strategy (ToT/ReAct/Plan-Exec), reflection, replanning, sub-agents, constraint enforcement, st…
Read article →ReAct -- reasoning and acting interleaved
Deep-dive on the ReAct agent pattern: interleaving reasoning and acting (thought/action/observation), the loop, grounding in real results, adaptivity …
Read article →Agent request router architecture
Deep-dive on request routing for agent systems: a cheap classifier that scores intent and difficulty, a routing policy that dispatches to a cheap mode…
Read article →Agent tool sandboxing -- containing what agents can do
Deep-dive on agent tool sandboxing: the untrusted-agent threat (LLM-driven, prompt-injectable), sandboxing tool execution, isolation levels (process/c…
Read article →Agent semantic cache architecture
Deep-dive on semantic caching for LLM agents: embedding-based nearest-neighbor lookup, the similarity threshold as the precision/hit-rate dial, scope …
Read article →Speculative tool execution for agents
Deep-dive on speculative tool execution in LLM agents: predicting the next tool call, running read-only tools eagerly in a sandbox, committing on a ma…
Read article →Agent state machine architecture
Deep-dive on modeling an LLM agent as an explicit finite state machine: named states (intake, plan, act, observe, verify, respond, escalate, error) wi…
Read article →Agent task decomposition
Deep-dive on agent task decomposition: a decomposer that plans subtasks and dependencies, a scheduler that releases the ready set and exploits paralle…
Read article →Agent tool-call recovery architecture
Deep-dive on making agent tool calls robust: an error taxonomy (transient / invalid-input / permanent), idempotency keys for safe replay, exponential …
Read article →Agent tool schema versioning architecture
Deep-dive on versioning agent tool schemas: why a schema is a prompt not an API contract, immutable versioned registries, compatibility classification…
Read article →Tool selection architecture
Deep-dive on dynamic tool selection (tool retrieval) for agents whose catalog has grown to hundreds or thousands of tools, where listing them all in t…
Read article →Multi-Agent Collaboration & Negotiation: Orchestrating Collective Intelligence
Multi-Agent Collaboration & Negotiation: Orchestrating Collective Intelligence
Read article →Multi-Agent Communication Protocols: The Language of Collaboration
Multi-Agent Communication Protocols: The Language of Collaboration
Read article →Multi-Agent Systems: What Happens When a 'Developer' LLM Talks to a 'Reviewer' LLM?
Individual AI agents, equipped with planning capabilities and tool-use (as discussed in previous articles), are remarkably powerful.
Read article →Deploying Agentic Systems
System design for running autonomous agents in production: sandboxing execution, why minutes-long agent runs break normal request-response autoscaling…
Read article →Cost and Latency Budgets for LLM Products
A system design framework for budgeting cost and latency across an LLM product before building it: decomposing end-to-end latency and cost-per-request…
Read article →LLM Gateway Architecture
System design for the infrastructure layer between applications and LLM providers: request routing by cost/latency/capability, rate-limit pooling acro…
Read article →Designing a RAG Pipeline at Scale
System design for a production RAG pipeline: ingestion and chunking trade-offs, embedding generation and batching, the index write path, retrieval and…
Read article →Vector Search Infrastructure
System design for vector search at scale: index-type trade-offs (HNSW vs IVF vs flat), sharding an index across nodes, recall versus latency versus me…
Read article →The Rise of 'Thinking' Models: How Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Is Turning LLMs into Logic Engines
Large Language Models (LLMs) have captivated the world with their ability to generate fluent, coherent, and often creative text.
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