Tag
Agents
16 articles tagged with Agents.
When to write an agent skill
Vercel ran an eval where installed skills scored exactly the same as no documentation at all, because the agent never opened them in 56% of cases. A flat docs index in AGENTS.md scored 100% on the same suite. The useful reading of that result is about which of two jobs you're doing: putting a fact in front of the model, or getting a sequence carried out the same way every time.
MCP's Progressive Tool Discovery
Progressive tool discovery is usually sold on prompt caching. Keep the tools array fixed, the argument goes, and the cached prefix survives. I ran 72 benchmarks across gemini-3.5, 3.6 and 3.7 Flash at 14, 42, 84 and 280 tools. The fixed prefix cached in exactly zero of 36 runs, the pattern it argues against cached up to 93%, and the point where the pattern starts paying moved down to about 20 tools on the newest model.
Stateless MCP servers
The MCP server most tutorials ship, mine included, opens with a session handshake: initialize, get back an Mcp-Session-Id, carry it on every request, hold a live transport per client on the server. A stateless server drops all of it. Each request stands alone, any copy of the server can answer it, and the July 2026 spec makes that the only model there is. Here are both servers side by side, compared on the wire.
The agent said it was in stock
Agents keep giving me confident, wrong answers about the real world. WebMCP fixes half of that problem; discovery is still wide open.
The forward deployed engineer land grab
Four companies committed roughly $9 billion in nine weeks to putting their own engineers inside customer organisations. What a forward deployed engineer actually costs, who really gets one, and the question to ask before you sign anything: what remains when they leave?
Authenticating MCP servers
Almost every MCP tutorial, mine included, ships a server with no idea who's calling it: any client that reaches the endpoint gets the same data. For a while the protocol had no answer to that. It does now, and auth is the part of the MCP spec that has moved most. Here's the smallest server that sits on the right side of it, with a bearer token at the door and each user seeing only their own data, checked on the wire.
Introduction to WebMCP
WebMCP lets a page hand structured tools to an in-browser agent instead of making it guess at your UI. I wired 22 tools into Watch Anchor; here's how the API works and what I learned.
MCP Apps
For its first eighteen months MCP let a model call a tool and read the result back as text. That's a low ceiling the moment a user wants to sort, filter or drill into something. MCP Apps raise it: the server ships an actual interface into the chat. Here's how MCP got here, what the new proposal says, and a small app you can run in Claude Desktop, built on the official SDK and checked against the spec.
What is Loop Engineering
Everyone is quoting "design loops that prompt your agents" and few can say what a loop actually is. Here's the plain version, plus the part the hype skips: the loop is the easy bit. What's hard is that it makes your understanding optional, and nothing in it tells you when you've stopped understanding what ships.
Kitsune: a local-first agent runtime
I built a managed-agent runtime that runs entirely on one laptop. In this post I show you how you can set it up.
Build Your Own Agent Harness
What an agent harness is, how you build one, and why it is where the work now lives. I start from a bare loop, break it on real tasks, and walk the five places every harness ends up reaching for.
Agent Experience (AX) and the Agent Experience Interface (AXI): a working demo
A companion to my AX and AXI piece. I built one fictional CLI twice, once human-only and once agent-ready, pointed a small Google ADK agent at each, and watched what happened. With the interactive demo and the real numbers.
Agent Experience (AX) and the Agent Experience Interface (AXI): a working guide
What Agent Experience means, where AXI fits inside it, and what companies that take both seriously are actually changing about their products. With the official sources and the benchmark numbers.
What is agentic AI? A working definition for 2026
A direct definition of agentic AI, what's actually shipping in production today, what isn't, and the five things worth building first. With specifics, citations, and an honest list of what doesn't work yet.
Filesystem as Context: Building an AI Detective with bash-tool
Instead of stuffing documents into prompts, give your AI agent a filesystem and let it retrieve its own context. Here's how, using a murder mystery detective as the demo.
Building AI Agents with Google ADK: A Practical Guide
Learn how to build multi-agent systems with vector search, tool orchestration, and semantic understanding using Google's Agent Development Kit (JS/TS version).