AI Agents

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?
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