Agent Design
How you actually build AI agents that work. Architectures, tool use, memory patterns, and the frameworks worth paying attention to.
Guides and explainers
Detailed guides and practical technical analysis.
Latest analysis
Recent research, benchmark reviews and technical updates.
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Templates for budgets and project planning
BoredTools offers practical spreadsheets for budgets, freelance work and small projects.
When NOT to Use an Agent: The Production Data That Should Change Your Default
Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by end of 2027 , not because AI doesn't work, but because escalating costs, unclear business value, and inadequate risk controls compound faster in agent architectures than in simpler ones. The vendor that profits most from selling...
Anthropic's 186-Deal Experiment Shows What the Agent Economy Actually Looks Like
In December 2025, Anthropic gave 69 employees $100 each and told them to let Claude agents trade on their behalf. The agents bought and sold real items (services, digital goods, subscriptions) listed by other employees in a controlled marketplace. The experiment ran for several weeks. When it end...
Small Language Model Agents: The 2026 Practical Guide to Sub-10B Deployments
In February 2025, using a small model as an autonomous agent felt like a compromise: you got cheaper inference but accepted meaningful capability loss on planning, tool selection, and multi-step reasoning. That trade-off calculus has flipped.
How to Build Agent Evals That Catch Real Failures
Standard LLM benchmarks miss the failures that actually hurt in production. Here's how to build an evaluation system for agents that catches cascading errors, trajectory drift, and policy violations before they reach users.
Why AI Agent Deployments Fail — And What the Survivors Do Differently
Agent deployments fail for recurring reasons: weak problem framing, brittle long-horizon performance, poor observability, and missing human-in-the-loop controls.
AI Agent Frameworks in 2026: How to Choose Without Getting Burned
In October 2025, Microsoft moved AutoGen into maintenance mode. The framework that led the GAIA benchmark by four points and doubled its competitors on...
AI Agent ROI: The Calculator and Framework That Cuts Through Vendor Math
Your vendor says the AI agent will save $500,000 a year. Their spreadsheet shows it. The math looks clean.
MCP Server Architecture in Practice: Tools, Resources, Prompts, and Safe Invocation
Implement MCP servers with robust tool/resource contracts, safe invocation flows, and versioning strategies for production agent systems.
Agent Reliability Scores Are Getting Worse, Not Better
SWE-Bench scores tick up every quarter, but production failure rates aren't dropping. A METR study found half of test-passing PRs wouldn't be merged. The more capable we make agents, the less reliably they behave.
How MCP, A2A, and ACP Differ in Practice
Compare Model Context Protocol, Agent-to-Agent Protocol, and Agent Communication Protocol on transport, authentication, tool discovery, and real-world adoption.