Tagged ai-agents
9 pieces
- · 7 min read
Human in the Loop or Safe State: Choosing Your Fallback
When a system cannot proceed safely, it has two options: hand the decision to a person, or take a defined safe action itself. Which one is correct is decided by whether a person is reachable inside the time the situation allows, and that single test resolves most of the argument.
- · 6 min read
Durable Execution, Idempotency, or Both
A workflow engine guarantees your process resumes. It does not guarantee your side effect happened once. Those are different properties solving different halves of the same failure, and buying the first while assuming it delivers the second is the most common way a durable system still double-charges someone.
- · 7 min read
Build or Buy Your Agent Infrastructure
Almost every agent platform sells the part that is easy and leaves you the part that is hard. The loop, the tool dispatch, and the trace viewer are commodity. Whether your system knows it made progress, what it does when it gives up, and what stops a call tree are yours regardless of what you buy.
- · 7 min read
Desired State: How Fleet Systems Made Double Execution Impossible
Infrastructure engineering solved a problem AI agents are currently rediscovering. Declaring the state you want, rather than the action you want taken, makes repeating an operation harmless by construction. The interesting part is not the idea. It is exactly which properties do the work, because two of the three are usually missing when people borrow the pattern.
- · 7 min read
When Not to Ship an Autonomous Agent
There is a test that decides it, and it is not about model quality. If you cannot compute, in code, a number that tells you whether the task is closer to done, you cannot build a reliable agent for it yet. The honest move is a bounded assistant with a human terminal state, which is not a lesser product. It is the same capability with the failure mode removed.
- · 7 min read
Five Questions for Your Next AI Design Review
You should not have to read a trace to know whether an agent is safe to ship. Five questions, none of them technical, each with a right answer and a recognisable wrong one. They take ten minutes and they find the failure modes that pass every demo, because the failures live in what the system does when it does not succeed.
- · 8 min read
The Verifier That Verifies Nothing
Naming a pipeline stage 'verifier' does not make it one. If the stage is another model call asked whether the output looks right, it shares the generator's blind spots, produces an opinion rather than a check, and has almost certainly never rejected anything. There is a ladder of verifier strength with five rungs, and most production systems are on the bottom one while believing they are near the top.
- · 7 min read
The Five Ways a Loop Fails to Stop
Floyd gave us the conditions a terminating loop has to satisfy in 1967. Negate them one at a time and you get an exhaustive list of the ways termination can fail, which turns a vague symptom into five named diagnoses with five different fixes. Your agent is almost certainly number four, and number four is the only one that looks like success.
- · 7 min read
Two Correct Termination Proofs Compose Into a Hang
Your planner stops. Your executor stops. Both proofs are valid and neither is wrong. Put them in a loop together and the system runs forever, because termination is not a property that composes. Podelski and Rybalchenko formalised the fix in 2004, and it explains exactly why per-component monitoring cannot see a hang that lives between components.