10 posts found
The context window is a budget, not a memory
Bigger context windows did not give models memory. They gave you a larger envelope to fill on every single request — and...
Why models hallucinate, and what actually reduces it
Hallucination is not a glitch that a better model will one day remove. It is what generation does when it has nothing to...
System prompts: the instructions the user never sees
A system prompt sets the rules for everything that follows. Written well it is the cheapest quality improvement availabl...
Structured output beats parsing prose
If your code needs a value from a model, ask for JSON and validate it. Regexing an answer out of a paragraph is a bug wa...
Choosing between a large model and a small one
Most production traffic does not need the largest model available. Routing by task rather than defaulting to the top of...
An agent is a loop, not a personality
Strip away the branding and an agent is a small loop: call the model, run the tool it asked for, feed the result back, r...
Tool calling is an API contract the model can read
A tool definition is documentation with a schema attached. Write it for a capable colleague who has never seen your syst...
Why agents fail on long tasks
An agent that handles five steps beautifully can fall apart at twenty. The reason is rarely reasoning — it is that the c...
Giving an agent memory without giving it amnesia
Memory is not a feature you enable. It is a set of decisions about what to keep, what to summarise and what to let go —...
When a workflow beats an agent
If you already know the steps, do not ask a model to rediscover them on every request. A fixed pipeline with model calls...