Tag: agents
All the articles with the tag "agents".
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Teaching Your Agent Standard Operating Procedures
Skills are Standard Operating Procedures the agent loads only when needed — progressive disclosure applied to AI context. Without a forced-eval hook they activate 55% of the time; with one, 100%. That gap is the difference between skills working and skills being decoration. Plus why hooks are the enforcement layer that makes any of it reliable.
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The Great Agent Tooling Debate
Load 84 MCP tools and 15,540 tokens are gone before you ask a question; after thirty minutes you've burned 40% of your context on tool definitions you didn't use. Holmes and Yilmaz make the case for CLI-first, and I've mostly come round: CLIs are debuggable, composable, and 92-98% cheaper in tokens. MCP still earns its keep for a few tools, but the default should flip.
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Surviving the Context Window in Practice
The context window is a budget, not a feature. Auto-compaction hides the bill until the agent starts hallucinating. Practical tactics for staying under budget: scope per session, offload to disk, dispatch subagents for research, and clear aggressively between phases. The goal isn't a bigger window; it's needing less of it.
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The Only Workflow That Works
AI agents amplify whatever engineering process they're given. Bad specs produce confident garbage at machine speed. Three practitioner workflows for separating planning from execution: the normal coding flow, Boris Tane's annotated plan cycle, and Jamon Holmgren's Night Shift spec discipline. The pattern is simple; the discipline is resisting the urge to skip straight to implementation.
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An Opinionated Starting Point for Claude Code Users
A curated configuration for Claude Code that bundles plugins, skills, CLI tools, and sandbox guards into a single install script. What it does, how to use it, and why you should fork it immediately.