- What Is an Agent, Really?
- The Action Boundary
- Candidate Generation and Selection
- Critique, Revision, and Acceptance
- Planning and Execution
- Runtime State, Progress, and Termination
- Capabilities and Routing
- Memory and Selective Recall
- Trajectory Search
- Evidence and Verification
- Building the Complete Agent
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 19: Can Your Agent Explore in Parallel Without Creating Chaos? Use Speculative Execution and Early Cancellation
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 26: Why Did the Agent Fail? Build an Incident Forensics Pipeline
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 27: How Reliable Does an Agent Need to Be? Define SLOs and Error Budgets
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 28: Where Should You Spend the Next Engineering Hour? Prioritize Reliability by Risk and Expected Return
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 29: When Should an Agent Stop and Ask a Human? Design Authority Boundaries and Escalation
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 30: Is This Task Outside Your Agent’s Competence? Build Competence Envelopes and OOD Detection
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 31: How Can an Agent Learn New Capabilities Without Expanding Its Own Authority? Use Sandboxed Capability Acquisition
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 32: Which Capabilities Are Actually Worth Building? Design a Capability Portfolio
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 33: Which Shared Components Actually Unlock More Capability? Build a Capability Dependency Graph
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 34: Where Should This Task Actually Run? Build Capability-Aware Placement Across Models, Providers and Resource Pools
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 35: How Do You Move a Running Agent Between Workers Without Losing Meaning? Build Portable Execution State and Safe Handoff
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 36: Is Your Agent Acting on Stale State? Build Temporal Consistency, Freshness Budgets and Conflict Detection
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 37: Is Your Agent Still Solving the Right Task? Build Intent Versioning, Supersession and Cancellation
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 38: A Plan Is Not a Commitment — Model Goals, Commitments and Executable Work
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 39: How Do You Make an Agent Survive for Days? Build Durable Long-Running Workflows
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 40: Your Agent Changed the World. What Happens When Step Two Fails? Build Transactions, Compensation and Reconciliation
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 41: What Should Your Agent Trust? Build Explicit Security and Trust Boundaries
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 42: How Do Multiple Agents Coordinate Without Becoming a Distributed Argument?
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 43: Who Controls the Agent? Build an Explicit Agent Control Plane
- You Probably Don't Need All of This: Build the Minimum Production Agent Architecture
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 06: Does One Agent Plan, Execute and Judge Its Own Work? Build a Planner-Executor-Critic Architecture
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 05: Is One Model Doing Everything? Build a Mixture of Experts at the Agent Level
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 04: Does Your Agent Prune Good Ideas Too Early? Use Monte Carlo Tree Search for Long-Horizon Reasoning
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 03: Does Your Agent Commit to a Bad Reasoning Path Too Early? Build a Tree of Thoughts
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 02: Why Does My Reasoning Agent Give a Different Answer Every Time? Use Self-Consistency Without Confusing Consensus With Truth
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 01: Does Your AI Agent Fail on Complex Reasoning Tasks? Treat Chain of Thought as Computation, Not Proof
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 00: When Should You Use an Advanced Agent Architecture?
- Agents From First Principles 09: AI Agent Says It Worked When It Didn’t? Verify the Result Outside the LLM
- Agents From First Principles 08: AI Agent Picks the First Solution? Add Search Instead of One-Shot Generation
- Agents From First Principles 07: AI Agent Forgets Previous Work? Add Working, Semantic and Episodic Memory
- Agents From First Principles 06: AI Agent Chooses the Wrong Tool? Design Better Tool Interfaces, Schemas and Routing
- Agents From First Principles 05: AI Agent Gets Stuck in a Loop? Add State, Feedback and Stopping Conditions
- Agents From First Principles 04: AI Agent Fails on Multi-Step Tasks? Separate Planning From Execution
- Agents From First Principles 03: AI Agent Keeps Making the Same Mistake? Add a Critique-and-Revision Loop
- Agents From First Principles 02: AI Agent Gives Inconsistent Answers? Generate Multiple Candidates and Rank Them
- AI Agent Returning Invalid Tool Calls? How to Validate LLM Actions
- Agents From First Principles 00: What Is an Agent, Really?
- Advanced Agents From First Principles 07: Do Your Agents Agree Too Easily? Use Adversarial Review and Multi-Agent Debate Without Confusing Debate With Truth
- The Moment: Intelligence beyond context