11 min read
Approve Effects, Not Invocations
Approve effects, not invocations: why agent approval records miss harm in install hooks and skill combinations, and why pipelines need closure metrics.
ANALYSIS
18 articles
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The Text Is a Control Surface
The text agents read is a control surface: bad MCP error messages cost more on stronger models, and context hygiene gains value with every model upgrade.
•12 min read
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10 min read
The Agent Is the Worst Witness to Its Own Run
An agent's report on its own run is unreliable, and eight studies show why. The fix: append-only traces, obligation ledgers, and records the agent cannot write.
11 min read
Absence Is the Failure Mode
AI scribe audits show omission is the dominant error, and LLM judges are near coin-flip at catching it. The fix: enumerate the facts, then check each one.
10 min read
Your Agent Has a Five-Constraint Budget
Agent instruction following collapses past five or six simultaneous constraints. Why rules also die in compaction and handoffs, and why side channels help.
10 min read
The Response Looked Right. The Work Was Not Done.
AI agents often claim completion they did not earn. New benchmarks measure the gap, and evidence-carrying termination makes done a checked artifact.
9 min read
The Quiet Tax on Your Cheap Agent Tier
Agent model compression has a hidden tax: quantized and pruned agents lose knowledge first and stay confidently wrong. Why cheaper agents start at the cache.
10 min read
The Oracle Is Agreeing With Itself
Self-improving test generation loops can grade against an oracle that agrees with itself. An audit shows the inflated gain and why independent checks count.
11 min read
The Judge Is Now a System You Design
LLM judges flip verdicts under pushback and rankings shift with token budget. The design spec for a judge system, including cheap deliberating juries.
11 min read
Skill Files Are the New Supply Chain Attack Surface
Skill files are a supply chain attack surface: adversarial skills exploit a mainstream coding agent in over 95% of runs. The fix is admission engineering.
10 min read
The Plateau Was the Instrument
A benchmark plateau can be a broken yardstick: a SciCode audit found 263 defects, and corrected scores jump to 84-98 percent. How to read flat leaderboards.
11 min read
Kill Your Agent Runs Early
Kill your agent runs early: production traces show context goes stale at turn boundaries, and the fixes that moved numbers are kill, carry the state, restart.
10 min read
The Judge Is Leaving the Agent Loop
The LLM judge is leaving the agent loop: evidence gates, verifiable rewards and deploy-time certificates replace verdicts with structure. Here is our bet.
Showing 12 of 17 articles
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