标签：#Agents

The one-year-old startup aims to reinvent financial architecture for autonomous AI transactions.

Optimizing RAG at Scale: Chunking, Retrieval, and the Bayesian Search That Cut Latency 40% How we moved from "semantic search + hope" to a measured, tunable retrieval pipeline with 95% recall@10 The RAG Reality Check Everyone ships RAG the same way: chunk by 512 tokens, embed with text-embedding-3-small , top-k=5, stuff into context. It works for demos. Then you hit production: Legal contracts: 512 tokens splits clauses mid-sentence API docs: 1000-token chunks drown signal in noise Customer tickets: Conversational context needs overlap, not fixed windows Latency: 500ms embedding + 200ms vector search + 300ms LLM = 1s+ per query We rebuilt our retrieval layer from first principles. Here's what actually moves metrics. Chunking: One Size Fits None # rag/chunking.py from abc import ABC , abstractmethod from dataclasses import dataclass @dataclass class Chunk : text : str metadata : dict token_count : int chunk_id : str class ChunkingStrategy ( ABC ): @abstractmethod def chunk ( self , document : str , metadata : dict ) -> list [ Chunk ]: ... class FixedTokenChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ Baseline. Good for homogeneous content. """ def __init__ ( self , chunk_size = 512 , overlap = 50 ): self . chunk_size = chunk_size self . overlap = overlap class RecursiveChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ Respects structure: markdown headers, code blocks, paragraphs. """ def __init__ ( self , separators = [ " \n ## " , " \n ### " , " \n\n " , " \n " , " " ], chunk_size = 512 ): self . separators = separators self . chunk_size = chunk_size class SemanticChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ Uses embedding similarity to find natural boundaries. """ def __init__ ( self , model = " text-embedding-3-small " , threshold = 0.7 ): self . model = model self . threshold = threshold class AgenticChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ LLM decides boundaries. Expensive but highest quality for complex docs. """ def __init__ ( self , model = " gpt-4o-mini " ): self . model = model Our production config by

Building Production-Grade LLM Evaluation Pipelines: From Vibes to Metrics How we replaced "looks good to me" with automated evaluation catching 92% of hallucinations before deployment The Problem: Why "Vibe Checks" Fail in Production Three months ago, our team shipped a RAG-based customer support assistant. It worked great in testing — we'd ask it questions, read the answers, and say "yeah, that looks right." Then it hit production. A customer asked about their billing cycle. The assistant confidently cited a policy that didn't exist. Another asked about API rate limits and got numbers from a competitor's documentation. By the time we caught it, 500+ users had seen hallucinated responses. The post-mortem was brutal: we had zero automated evaluation . Our test process was literally "ask 5 questions, read answers, thumbs up." What Production Evaluation Actually Needs Academic benchmarks (MMLU, HellaSwag) don't tell you if your system works for your use case. Production evaluation needs: Domain-specific judges — Your criteria, not generic "helpfulness" Speed — Evaluation must run in CI/CD, not overnight Regression detection — Know immediately when a prompt change breaks things CI/CD integration — Block merges that degrade quality Golden dataset management — Versioned, stratified, growing test cases Architecture: The Evaluation Pipeline ┌─────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ ┌────────────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ │ Test Cases │────▶│ LLM Under │────▶│ Judge Ensemble │────▶│ Metrics & │ │ (Golden Set)│ │ Test │ │ - Faithfulness │ │ Regression │ └─────────────┘ └──────────────┘ │ - Instruction F. │ │ Detection │ │ - JSON Schema │ └──────┬───────┘ │ - Custom LLM │ ▼ └────────────────────┘ ┌──────────────┐ │ Dashboard/ │ │ PR Comments │ └──────────────┘ Core Abstractions # eval/base.py @dataclass ( frozen = True ) class TestCase : id : str input : dict [ str , Any ] expected : dict [ str , Any ] | None = None tags : list [ str ] = field ( default_factory = list ) # ["edge-case",

A team lead asks the question in a planning meeting and the room splits three ways: do we build this agent in Copilot Studio, write the orchestration ourselves and host it, or hand our container to Foundry and let it run our code? All three are official Microsoft build paths in 2026, all three end up in the same tenant-wide agent inventory, and the wrong pick costs you a rebuild once the project outgrows it. The answer is not "the most powerful one." It is the one whose service model matches who is building the agent, who owns the runtime, and how much pro-code control over orchestration and protocols you actually need. This article is the decision framework for that choice, grounded in Microsoft Learn and current as of mid-2026. Two of these three paths are public preview, so this is a guide to architectural fit and direction, not a production-reliability scorecard. TL;DR Three build paths, picked by service model, not power. Copilot Studio: low-code managed SaaS for makers. GA. Foundry Hosted agents: managed PaaS runtime for your own container. Public preview. Microsoft 365 Agents SDK: pro-code, self-hosted, widest channel reach. Agent Framework orchestrator in public preview. Monday move: before picking a platform, write down four things for this agent - who builds it (maker or pro-dev), who must own the compute, what channels it has to reach, and whether you need custom protocols or background/async behavior. Those four answers pick the path more reliably than a feature checklist. The three paths in one paragraph each Microsoft's own Cloud Adoption Framework frames the build options as three service tiers, which is the cleanest mental model to start from. The CAF positions them as Copilot Studio (SaaS, no/low-code), Microsoft Foundry (PaaS, pro-code or low-code), and GPUs and Containers (IaaS, code-first frameworks for maximum flexibility). The first two are managed by Microsoft. The third is where the self-hosted SDK path lives when you own the compute end to e

Optimizing RAG at Scale: Chunking, Retrieval, and the Bayesian Search That Cut Latency 40% How we moved from "semantic search + hope" to a measured, tunable retrieval pipeline with 95% recall@10 The RAG Reality Check Everyone ships RAG the same way: chunk by 512 tokens, embed with text-embedding-3-small , top-k=5, stuff into context. It works for demos. Then you hit production: Legal contracts: 512 tokens splits clauses mid-sentence API docs: 1000-token chunks drown signal in noise Customer tickets: Conversational context needs overlap, not fixed windows Latency: 500ms embedding + 200ms vector search + 300ms LLM = 1s+ per query We rebuilt our retrieval layer from first principles. Here's what actually moves metrics. Chunking: One Size Fits None # rag/chunking.py from abc import ABC , abstractmethod from dataclasses import dataclass @dataclass class Chunk : text : str metadata : dict token_count : int chunk_id : str class ChunkingStrategy ( ABC ): @abstractmethod def chunk ( self , document : str , metadata : dict ) -> list [ Chunk ]: ... class FixedTokenChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ Baseline. Good for homogeneous content. """ def __init__ ( self , chunk_size = 512 , overlap = 50 ): self . chunk_size = chunk_size self . overlap = overlap class RecursiveChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ Respects structure: markdown headers, code blocks, paragraphs. """ def __init__ ( self , separators = [ " \n ## " , " \n ### " , " \n\n " , " \n " , " " ], chunk_size = 512 ): self . separators = separators self . chunk_size = chunk_size class SemanticChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ Uses embedding similarity to find natural boundaries. """ def __init__ ( self , model = " text-embedding-3-small " , threshold = 0.7 ): self . model = model self . threshold = threshold class AgenticChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ LLM decides boundaries. Expensive but highest quality for complex docs. """ def __init__ ( self , model = " gpt-4o-mini " ): self . model = model Our production config by

Building Production-Grade LLM Evaluation Pipelines: From Vibes to Metrics How we replaced "looks good to me" with automated evaluation catching 92% of hallucinations before deployment The Problem: Why "Vibe Checks" Fail in Production Three months ago, our team shipped a RAG-based customer support assistant. It worked great in testing — we'd ask it questions, read the answers, and say "yeah, that looks right." Then it hit production. A customer asked about their billing cycle. The assistant confidently cited a policy that didn't exist. Another asked about API rate limits and got numbers from a competitor's documentation. By the time we caught it, 500+ users had seen hallucinated responses. The post-mortem was brutal: we had zero automated evaluation . Our test process was literally "ask 5 questions, read answers, thumbs up." What Production Evaluation Actually Needs Academic benchmarks (MMLU, HellaSwag) don't tell you if your system works for your use case. Production evaluation needs: Domain-specific judges — Your criteria, not generic "helpfulness" Speed — Evaluation must run in CI/CD, not overnight Regression detection — Know immediately when a prompt change breaks things CI/CD integration — Block merges that degrade quality Golden dataset management — Versioned, stratified, growing test cases Architecture: The Evaluation Pipeline ┌─────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ ┌────────────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ │ Test Cases │────▶│ LLM Under │────▶│ Judge Ensemble │────▶│ Metrics & │ │ (Golden Set)│ │ Test │ │ - Faithfulness │ │ Regression │ └─────────────┘ └──────────────┘ │ - Instruction F. │ │ Detection │ │ - JSON Schema │ └──────┬───────┘ │ - Custom LLM │ ▼ └────────────────────┘ ┌──────────────┐ │ Dashboard/ │ │ PR Comments │ └──────────────┘ Core Abstractions # eval/base.py @dataclass ( frozen = True ) class TestCase : id : str input : dict [ str , Any ] expected : dict [ str , Any ] | None = None tags : list [ str ] = field ( default_factory = list ) # ["edge-case",

Your agent isn't hallucinating. It's reasoning correctly over the wrong inputs. Here's a failure pattern every team running agents in production has hit: An alert fires. The agent investigates: pulls metrics, checks recent deploys, scans logs, proposes a fix. The fix is confidently, articulately wrong. Instinct says blame the model (bad reasoning, needs a better prompt, maybe a bigger model). Then someone reconstructs what the agent actually saw. The metrics query returned a 5-minute-old cached aggregate. The deploy list was fetched before the relevant deploy landed. The log window was truncated at 1,000 lines and the line that mattered was #1,014. Given those inputs, the agent's conclusion was reasonable. It just wasn't debugging the incident that happened. It's garbage in, garbage out, with a twist that makes it worse for agents than for any previous software. A dashboard shows you the garbage. A human sees a stale chart and might notice the timestamp. An agent consumes the garbage silently and acts on it, with fluent reasoning layered on top. The output doesn't look like garbage; it looks like a confident, well-argued investigation. That confidence is what makes it dangerous. Why is this surfacing now For chatbots, context was mostly a retrieval problem over documents; mediocre retrieval meant a mediocre answer a human would shrug at. Three things changed with production agents: Agents act. A stale metric doesn't produce an off paragraph; it restarts the wrong service or pages the wrong team at 3AM. The cost went from cosmetic to operational. The input surface exploded. A production agent reads metrics, logs, deploy history, tickets, and chat from separate systems, each with its own latency, rate limits, caching, and clock. The "world" it reasons over is stitched together from partial snapshots, inside the model's reasoning loop, where nobody can inspect it. Errors compound. A single wrong input gives a slightly wrong answer. A 20-step investigation where step 3'

Perplexity added "Skills" to its Agent API, letting developers compose built-in and custom skills for more complex agent outputs. More skills mean more actions, and more actions mean more ways to produce an irreversible change. Before you add a fifth skill to your agent, make sure the first four have an undo path. The undo problem An agent skill that writes, sends, publishes, or deploys is an irreversible action if there is no rollback. The more skills an agent has, the more irreversible actions it can take in a single session. A chain of skills (research → draft → format → publish) can complete before a human notices the first step was wrong. The undo contract Every agent skill should declare: { "skill_name" : "publish_to_blog" , "action_type" : "write" , "reversible" : true , "undo_method" : "set_published_false" , "undo_timeout_seconds" : 3600 , "undo_side_effects" : [ "SEO index will retain the URL for up to 24h" ] } If reversible is false , the skill should require explicit human approval before execution. A skill registry with undo support # skill_registry.py """ Registers agent skills with undo metadata. Blocks irreversible skills from running without explicit approval. """ from dataclasses import dataclass from typing import Optional , Callable import json @dataclass class Skill : name : str action_type : str # "read", "write", "send", "deploy" reversible : bool undo_fn : Optional [ Callable ] = None undo_timeout_seconds : int = 3600 side_effects : str = "" requires_approval : bool = False class SkillRegistry : def __init__ ( self ): self . skills = {} self . execution_log = [] def register ( self , skill : Skill ): # Irreversible write/send/deploy skills require approval if not skill . reversible and skill . action_type in ( " write " , " send " , " deploy " ): skill . requires_approval = True self . skills [ skill . name ] = skill def execute ( self , skill_name : str , inputs : dict , approved : bool = False ): skill = self . skills . get ( skill_name ) i

Cursor's "Sand" project targets non-developers. Anthropic's Claude Cowork runs cross-device. OpenAI's ChatGPT Work delivers documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. When an agent produces a deliverable for someone who cannot read the code, the verification interface matters more than the output format. A download button is not verification. The problem When a developer reviews agent output, they can read the diff, run the tests, and check the types. When a non-developer receives an agent-produced spreadsheet or document, they have no equivalent verification path. They either trust it completely or reject it completely. Neither is useful. What a verification UI needs Element Purpose Implementation Source list Show what inputs the agent used Links to source documents with timestamps Confidence indicator Flag low-confidence outputs Per-section confidence derived from source coverage Change highlights Show what the agent generated vs. copied Diff view between source and output Audit trail Record who requested what and when Append-only log with request ID, timestamp, and result hash Rejection path Let the user say "this is wrong" without starting over Feedback record linked to specific output section A minimal verification component <!-- agent-output-verification.html --> <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang= "en" > <head> <meta charset= "UTF-8" > <title> Agent Output Verification </title> <style> .verification-card { border : 1px solid #ddd ; border-radius : 8px ; padding : 16px ; margin : 8px 0 ; font-family : system-ui , sans-serif ; } .source-list { list-style : none ; padding : 0 ; } .source-list li { padding : 4px 0 ; border-bottom : 1px solid #eee ; } .confidence-low { color : #c0392b ; font-weight : bold ; } .confidence-medium { color : #e67e22 ; } .confidence-high { color : #27ae60 ; } .reject-btn { background : #fff ; border : 1px solid #c0392b ; color : #c0392b ; padding : 4px 12px ; border-radius : 4px ; cursor : pointer ; } .reject-btn :hover { background : #c0392b

Visual Studio 2026's July update added organization-level custom agents for GitHub Copilot. An organization owner can now define a custom agent that every repository in the org automatically detects and offers in the agent selector. This is powerful and introduces a rollout risk: a single agent definition affects every developer in the organization simultaneously. The rollout problem When an org-level agent is published, every developer working in any repo in that org sees it in their agent selector. If the agent definition contains an incorrect instruction, a broken tool reference, or an overly permissive scope, it affects all developers at once. There is no canary by default. The agent definition review checklist Before publishing an org-level custom agent, review its definition against this checklist. 1. Instruction review # agent-definition.yml (example structure) name : org-code-reviewer description : Reviews PRs for security and style instructions : | Review each file change. Flag: - SQL injection in string concatenation - Missing input validation on public endpoints - Hardcoded credentials Do not modify files. Only comment. tools : - read_file - search_code - post_comment scope : organization Check: [ ] Instructions are specific enough to be testable ("flag SQL injection in string concatenation" not "review for security") [ ] Instructions do not conflict with existing repository-level AGENTS.md files [ ] The agent does not claim capabilities it does not have (e.g., "run tests" when no tools entry supports it) 2. Tool surface audit # Extract all tool references from the agent definition rg -n 'tools:' agent-definition.yml -A 20 | grep '^\s*-' For each tool: What resource does it access? (filesystem, network, repository API) Is it read-only or read-write? Does it require elevated permissions beyond the developer's own role? A post_comment tool can create noise across every PR. A write_file tool can modify code in every repo. Audit accordingly. 3. Canary test Be

Augment Code's Vinay Perneti talks models, harnesses, and context.

Thomas Betts talks with Clare Liguori, the technical lead on the open source Strands Agents SDK. The conversation covers how Strands Agents has grown from a Python SDK to a full agent harness running in production. Clare shares some lessons learned from building agents at scale, shifting to a model-driven architecture, and what comes next as the LLMs that underpin agents continue to improve. By Clare Liguori

Optimizing RAG at Scale: Chunking, Retrieval, and the Bayesian Search That Cut Latency 40% How we moved from "semantic search + hope" to a measured, tunable retrieval pipeline with 95% recall@10 The RAG Reality Check Everyone ships RAG the same way: chunk by 512 tokens, embed with text-embedding-3-small , top-k=5, stuff into context. It works for demos. Then you hit production: Legal contracts: 512 tokens splits clauses mid-sentence API docs: 1000-token chunks drown signal in noise Customer tickets: Conversational context needs overlap, not fixed windows Latency: 500ms embedding + 200ms vector search + 300ms LLM = 1s+ per query We rebuilt our retrieval layer from first principles. Here's what actually moves metrics. Chunking: One Size Fits None # rag/chunking.py from abc import ABC , abstractmethod from dataclasses import dataclass @dataclass class Chunk : text : str metadata : dict token_count : int chunk_id : str class ChunkingStrategy ( ABC ): @abstractmethod def chunk ( self , document : str , metadata : dict ) -> list [ Chunk ]: ... class FixedTokenChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ Baseline. Good for homogeneous content. """ def __init__ ( self , chunk_size = 512 , overlap = 50 ): self . chunk_size = chunk_size self . overlap = overlap class RecursiveChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ Respects structure: markdown headers, code blocks, paragraphs. """ def __init__ ( self , separators = [ " \n ## " , " \n ### " , " \n\n " , " \n " , " " ], chunk_size = 512 ): self . separators = separators self . chunk_size = chunk_size class SemanticChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ Uses embedding similarity to find natural boundaries. """ def __init__ ( self , model = " text-embedding-3-small " , threshold = 0.7 ): self . model = model self . threshold = threshold class AgenticChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ LLM decides boundaries. Expensive but highest quality for complex docs. """ def __init__ ( self , model = " gpt-4o-mini " ): self . model = model Our production config by

Building Production-Grade LLM Evaluation Pipelines: From Vibes to Metrics How we replaced "looks good to me" with automated evaluation catching 92% of hallucinations before deployment The Problem: Why "Vibe Checks" Fail in Production Three months ago, our team shipped a RAG-based customer support assistant. It worked great in testing — we'd ask it questions, read the answers, and say "yeah, that looks right." Then it hit production. A customer asked about their billing cycle. The assistant confidently cited a policy that didn't exist. Another asked about API rate limits and got numbers from a competitor's documentation. By the time we caught it, 500+ users had seen hallucinated responses. The post-mortem was brutal: we had zero automated evaluation . Our test process was literally "ask 5 questions, read answers, thumbs up." What Production Evaluation Actually Needs Academic benchmarks (MMLU, HellaSwag) don't tell you if your system works for your use case. Production evaluation needs: Domain-specific judges — Your criteria, not generic "helpfulness" Speed — Evaluation must run in CI/CD, not overnight Regression detection — Know immediately when a prompt change breaks things CI/CD integration — Block merges that degrade quality Golden dataset management — Versioned, stratified, growing test cases Architecture: The Evaluation Pipeline ┌─────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ ┌────────────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ │ Test Cases │────▶│ LLM Under │────▶│ Judge Ensemble │────▶│ Metrics & │ │ (Golden Set)│ │ Test │ │ - Faithfulness │ │ Regression │ └─────────────┘ └──────────────┘ │ - Instruction F. │ │ Detection │ │ - JSON Schema │ └──────┬───────┘ │ - Custom LLM │ ▼ └────────────────────┘ ┌──────────────┐ │ Dashboard/ │ │ PR Comments │ └──────────────┘ Core Abstractions # eval/base.py @dataclass ( frozen = True ) class TestCase : id : str input : dict [ str , Any ] expected : dict [ str , Any ] | None = None tags : list [ str ] = field ( default_factory = list ) # ["edge-case",

Tu prueba pasó el lunes: misma entrada, mismo código y temperature=0 . El martes falló sin cambios en tu aplicación. La aserción esperaba una cadena exacta, pero el modelo devolvió la misma respuesta con una redacción ligeramente distinta. El agente funciona; tu suite de pruebas no. Prueba Apidog hoy Este es el coste de probar sistemas que llaman a modelos de lenguaje. Incluso con temperatura cero, no obtendrás salidas idénticas byte a byte entre ejecuciones. En lugar de probar la redacción exacta, prueba el contrato: estructura, campos, rangos y efectos esperados. Este artículo profundiza en el tercer modo de fallo de nuestra guía sobre por qué los agentes de IA fallan en producción . Por qué temperature=0 no significa determinismo La temperatura controla cómo el modelo selecciona el siguiente token. Con temperature=0 , el modelo elige el token más probable, lo que parece reproducible. Sin embargo, esa configuración no garantiza resultados idénticos. La causa está debajo del modelo: Las operaciones de punto flotante en GPU no son asociativas: el orden de las sumas puede modificar mínimamente el resultado. Esa diferencia puede cambiar cuál token queda en primer lugar. El orden de ejecución puede depender de cómo el proveedor agrupa solicitudes, del hardware, de la región o de la versión del kernel. Los proveedores pueden cambiar GPUs, bibliotecas de inferencia o cuantización de pesos. Una discusión extensa en vLLM explica por qué una semilla fija y temperature=0 no bastan para lograr reproducibilidad bit a bit. La conclusión práctica es simple: el determinismo es una propiedad de toda la pila de servicio, no una opción de tu solicitud. Tu prueba debe aceptar variaciones de redacción cuando el significado y el contrato siguen siendo correctos. Por qué las aserciones de cadena exacta vuelven inestable tu suite Esta prueba es frágil: assert response == " Your order total is $42.00. " Puede pasar hoy y fallar mañana si el modelo responde: Your total comes to $42.00. La

Your test passed on Monday. Same input, same code, temperature=0 . On Tuesday it failed, and you changed nothing. The assertion expected an exact string, but the model returned the same answer with slightly different wording. The agent is fine; the test is not. Try Apidog today This is the cost of testing language-model output. Even at temperature=0 , you cannot rely on byte-identical responses across runs. Instead of testing exact wording, test the API contract: structure, required fields, valid ranges, tool-call payloads, and safety constraints. This is a deeper look at failure mode three in our guide to why AI agents break in production . Why temperature=0 does not mean deterministic Temperature controls token sampling. At zero, the model selects the most probable next token, which sounds reproducible. In practice, the serving stack introduces variation. GPU floating-point math is not associative: adding the same values in a different order can produce small numerical differences. Those differences can change which token ranks highest. Once one token differs, every token after it can diverge. The order of operations can vary based on: Request batching GPU hardware Inference kernels Provider routing and regions Model-serving library versions Weight quantization changes Providers can also update infrastructure without changing your API request. As this vLLM discussion explains, a fixed seed and temperature=0 are not enough for bitwise reproducibility. Determinism is a property of the entire serving stack, not a request parameter. Design tests accordingly. Why exact-string assertions make tests flaky This assertion is fragile: assert . equal ( response , " Your order total is $42.00. " ); It fails if the model returns a correct variation: Your total comes to $42.00. The failure does not indicate a product regression. It indicates that the test is coupled to wording that is expected to vary. Flaky tests create a predictable failure pattern: Developers rerun the suite

Optimizing RAG at Scale: Chunking, Retrieval, and the Bayesian Search That Cut Latency 40% How we moved from "semantic search + hope" to a measured, tunable retrieval pipeline with 95% recall@10 The RAG Reality Check Everyone ships RAG the same way: chunk by 512 tokens, embed with text-embedding-3-small , top-k=5, stuff into context. It works for demos. Then you hit production: Legal contracts: 512 tokens splits clauses mid-sentence API docs: 1000-token chunks drown signal in noise Customer tickets: Conversational context needs overlap, not fixed windows Latency: 500ms embedding + 200ms vector search + 300ms LLM = 1s+ per query We rebuilt our retrieval layer from first principles. Here's what actually moves metrics. Chunking: One Size Fits None # rag/chunking.py from abc import ABC , abstractmethod from dataclasses import dataclass @dataclass class Chunk : text : str metadata : dict token_count : int chunk_id : str class ChunkingStrategy ( ABC ): @abstractmethod def chunk ( self , document : str , metadata : dict ) -> list [ Chunk ]: ... class FixedTokenChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ Baseline. Good for homogeneous content. """ def __init__ ( self , chunk_size = 512 , overlap = 50 ): self . chunk_size = chunk_size self . overlap = overlap class RecursiveChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ Respects structure: markdown headers, code blocks, paragraphs. """ def __init__ ( self , separators = [ " \n ## " , " \n ### " , " \n\n " , " \n " , " " ], chunk_size = 512 ): self . separators = separators self . chunk_size = chunk_size class SemanticChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ Uses embedding similarity to find natural boundaries. """ def __init__ ( self , model = " text-embedding-3-small " , threshold = 0.7 ): self . model = model self . threshold = threshold class AgenticChunker ( ChunkingStrategy ): """ LLM decides boundaries. Expensive but highest quality for complex docs. """ def __init__ ( self , model = " gpt-4o-mini " ): self . model = model Our production config by

Here's a problem every agent builder eventually runs into: your assistant needs to be good at a lot of things. Writing SQL. Composing emails. Debugging code. Maybe more later. So where do all those instructions go? The obvious answer is: cram them all into the system prompt. But that "obvious" answer causes real problems as your agent grows. In this post, I'll walk through those problems first, then show how the skills pattern in LangChain fixes them, using a small working example. The problem: one giant prompt Let's say you want a single assistant that can write SQL, draft emails, and help debug code. The naive approach is one big system prompt: You are a helpful assistant. When writing SQL: - Write queries using only SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE - Always use parameterized queries to prevent SQL injection - Format SQL keywords in UPPERCASE - Include brief comments for complex queries When writing emails: - Keep emails concise and professional - Use clear subject lines - Structure: greeting -> purpose -> details -> call to action -> sign-off - Adjust tone based on context When debugging: - First reproduce the error - Check logs and error messages - Isolate the root cause - Suggest a fix with explanation ... This works fine for three domains. But keep adding more — legal reviewing, data analysis, customer support scripts, code review standards — and you run into a few concrete issues: 1. Prompt bloat. Every single request pays the token cost of every domain's instructions, even if the user only asked about SQL. That's slower and more expensive for no benefit. 2. Instructions start to blur together. When the SQL rules, the email rules, and the debugging rules all sit in the same block of text, the model has to sift through everything at once. It's easy for instructions from one domain to bleed into another, or for the model to lose track of which rule applies where. 3. It doesn't scale. Every time you want to add a new specialty, you're editing one long, increasingl

Solo founders and small operators make big, irreversible calls alone. Expand into a new market or not. Kill the product line or keep bleeding on it. A real board of advisors would catch the bad ones, but real boards are expensive and slow, and most people running a 10-person company are never getting one. Steven and I kept circling this problem, so when the Qwen hackathon came around we built FounderOS: an AI board of directors. You bring one decision, eight specialist agents argue about it, and you get a board memo back. The thing we cared about most, and the reason we didn't just build another chatbot wrapper, is that the disagreement survives into the memo. If the board didn't align, you can read who dissented and what would change their mind. Live demo: https://founderos-zeta.vercel.app Repo: https://github.com/VincentJulijanto/FounderOS Video: https://youtu.be/X6x_u6IWHog The board It's a LangGraph state machine underneath. A Scout frames the options first. Market Intelligence pulls cited benchmarks. Four analysts (Trend, Finance, Growth, Capability) run in parallel with asyncio.gather. Then the Skeptic gets everyone's work and attacks the weakest assumption it can find, a debate engine detects the conflicts and runs rebuttal rounds, and the Chair writes the memo. We'd both seen multi-agent demos where five agents produce one suspiciously smooth answer, which means somewhere in the pipeline the disagreement got averaged out. We wanted the opposite. Agents revise their positions when the counterargument is good, and if a conflict doesn't resolve within the round limit it ships in the memo as attributed dissent instead of disappearing. Everything runs on Qwen through the DashScope API. We split by role: qwen-turbo does the fast work (Scout, the analysts, research, the memory index) and qwen-plus does the heavy reasoning (Skeptic, Chair, the debate itself). A full board run comes out to roughly two cents and about two minutes. The two cents part is what makes the

FROST 深度：为什么 AI Agent 需要「家族谱系」？ 前言：一个古老的管理学问题 你有没有想过，为什么人类社会的组织方式大多是「层级制」？ 从部落、到王国、到现代公司，我们习惯了一种结构： 有人决策，有人执行，有人监督 。 但当我们构建 AI Agent 系统时，为什么大多数框架都把 Agent 做成「孤岛」？每个 Agent 有自己的记忆、自己的工具、自己的行为逻辑——像一个没有家族传承的独立个体。 FROST 的核心理念是：Agent 应该有谱系、记忆和荣誉感。 1. 什么是「家族治理」？ FROST 引入了生物学的隐喻： Agent 家族 。 细胞会死，但谱系会存续。 Agent 会消亡，但宪法会传承。 资产会永存。 在这个框架里，有三个关键角色： 祖辈（Elder） ：定义不可违背的规则，是系统的「宪法」 父辈（Parent） ：负责领域协调，可以递归委托子任务 孙辈（Child） ：执行具体任务，用完即散 这不是简单的角色扮演，而是一套 结构化的治理协议 ： 协议一：层级 Store 继承 祖先 Store 对后代是只读的。后代只能继承和扩展，不能篡改祖先的记忆。 # 祖辈定义的宪法 ancestor_store = Store () ancestor_store . save ( " constitution " , { " rule_1 " : " always_validate_before_act " , " rule_2 " : " never_expose_raw_context " }) # 子孙只能继承，不能修改宪法 child_store = ChildStore ( ancestor_store ) 协议二：SOP 宪法校验 每个 SOP（标准操作流程）在执行前，必须经过祖辈审核。 # 子孙编写的 SOP child_sop = [ " fetch_user_data " , " process_payment " , " send_confirmation " ] # 执行前必须经过宪法校验 if not elder . validate_sop ( child_sop ): raise PermissionError ( " SOP violates constitution " ) 协议三：编排层级限制 禁止越级 spawn。父辈只能调度子辈，不能跨代指挥。 class Elder : max_spawn_generation = 0 # 祖辈不能 spawn class Parent : max_spawn_generation = 1 # 只能 spawn 子辈 class Child : max_spawn_generation = 2 # 只能 spawn 孙辈 协议四：选择性持久化 只有经过父辈审核的产出，才能进入家族记忆库。 # 子孙的临时产出 temp_result = child . execute ( task ) # 父辈决定是否收割 if parent . approve ( temp_result ): parent . merge_from ( child ) # 吸收有价值的结果 2. 为什么 Agent 需要「记忆传承」？ 当前大多数 Agent 框架的痛点： 每个对话都是全新的开始 。 你问 ChatGPT 一道数学题，它不会记得你上周问过类似的题目。你用 AutoGPT 做项目，它不会继承你之前调试的经验。 FROST 的解决方案是 分层的记忆系统 ： 层级 生命周期 用途 瞬时记忆 单次任务 工作区，只读不存 世代记忆 代际传递 子辈可继承祖先数据 宪法记忆 永久 不可修改，家族共享 经验记忆 按需收割 父辈选择性地吸收有价值产出 class HierarchicalStore ( Store ): """ 层级记忆系统 """ def __init__ ( self , ancestor_store = None ): self . ancestor = ancestor_store # 只读祖先记忆 self . local = {} # 本地可写记忆 def save ( self , key , value ): if key in self . ancestor : raise ValueError ( " Cannot override ancestor memory " ) self . local [ key ] = value def load ( self , key ): if key in self . local : return self . local [ key ] if key in self . ancesto