Posts about tooling
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Programs Over Prompts
The temptation in agent systems is to make everything a prompt. But most of the work is deterministic — and deterministic work deserves code, not suggestions.
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Stop Asking Which AI Model Is Better. Ask Which Phase.
The planning/execution split is more useful than any benchmark comparison.
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Progressive disclosure in MCP tools
When building MCP servers, search should return scannable summaries — not full content. Let the model decide what to read.
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The Nag Tax
When building automation around a third-party app, the first question to answer is: what's the one thing this app does that nothing else can replicate? That feature becomes the tax you pay on everything else.
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Benchmark Your Research Stack
Running 10 real queries through 5 tools revealed that theoretical routing rules have systematic gaps — and the surprises were more useful than the confirmations.
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Eliminate the Reminder, Don't Schedule It
When you catch yourself setting a reminder to check something later, that's usually a signal that a tool is failing to report what it should.
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You Are the Bottleneck in Your Own Agentic Workflow
Adding more AI tools doesn't help if you're still the bus between them.
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When Better Is Worse
Upgrading to a more capable model made my tool sixty times slower. The lesson isn't about models — it's about the difference between capability and fit.
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Instructions Don't Enforce Behavior. Templates Do.
Why the structure of an output matters more than the instructions that produce it.
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Your Tool Shouldn't Know What to Ignore
Configuration that belongs to the data shouldn't live in the tool. .gitignore figured this out thirty years ago.