Why Cheap Models Fail Silently in Long Agent Loops — and How to Catch It Before Your Users Do
A $0.14 model doesn't fail by throwing an error. It fails by getting slightly worse at every step until, forty turns in, it returns a confident wrong answer that passes your shallow check. Here are the four ways it happens and the four cheap guards that catch each one.
5 min
How to Resume an Agent's Stream After the Connection Drops
Durable execution saves the agent's work when the server dies. It does nothing for the user whose phone dropped Wi-Fi mid-answer — that's a different resume problem, on the other side of the wire, and the new stateless MCP spec quietly made it harder.
4 min
When Should an AI Agent Ask for Help? Why the Trigger Has to Live Outside the Model
Whole-task routing picks a model before the work starts. Agents need something harder: to notice, mid-trajectory, that they're now out of their depth — and three 2026 benchmarks say they can't be trusted to notice it themselves.
5 min
AI Agent Tool-Call Error Handling: The Most Dangerous Failure Returns 200 OK
Exponential backoff and durable checkpoints handle the errors that throw. They do nothing for the tool call that succeeds with the wrong answer — and that's the one that kills agents in production.
5 min
AI Agent Goal Drift: Why Long-Running Agents Quietly Abandon the Task You Gave Them
The failure isn't that the agent forgets the goal. It's that, step by step, a louder goal replaces it — and the fix is a ratio, not a bigger memory.
5 min
How to Ship an AI Agent Change Without Breaking It: Eval Gates, Shadow Replay, and Why Canaries Lie
You can't A/B test an agent the way you A/B test a button. The unit of variance is a trajectory, not a click — so the gate has to be offline, and "shadow mode" means something different than it does for a model.
4 min
Why Multi-Step AI Agents Fail in Production (and How to Make Them Reliable)
A model that solves a task 61% of the time can be reliable only 25% of the time. The gap between those two numbers is where production agents go to die.
5 min