标签：#Agents

Most teams connecting AI agents to their data warehouse start with text-to-SQL. The agent generates SQL from natural language, runs it against the warehouse, and returns results. It works until it doesn't: hallucinated JOINs, inconsistent aggregations, no access control, no audit trail. There's a better approach. Define your business metrics in a semantic layer, expose them via MCP (Model Context Protocol), and let any AI agent query governed definitions instead of raw tables. Then add one tool so the agent can chart the result in Claude or ChatGPT. This tutorial shows how to set it up in under 30 minutes. Why does text-to-SQL break in production? The agent sees column names but not business logic. It doesn't know that your company excludes refunds from revenue. It doesn't know that status = 'completed' means something different in orders than in subscriptions . It doesn't know that marketing and finance defined "active user" differently three years ago and never reconciled. So the agent writes plausible SQL and returns plausible numbers. Ask the same question twice with different phrasing and you get different answers. Ask two different agents and you get two different numbers. Neither matches the number your finance team reports. Beyond consistency, there's no row-level security. No multi-tenancy. No audit trail showing which agent queried what, when, and for whom. In production, with real customers, that's a non-starter. Text-to-SQL gives you speed. It doesn't give you trust. What is the semantic layer approach? Instead of letting agents write arbitrary SQL, define your metrics once in YAML: cubes, measures, dimensions, access rules. Then expose those definitions via MCP so agents query governed metrics, not raw tables. The difference: every agent gets the same answer because the metric definition is fixed. total_revenue isn't a column the agent interprets. It's a pre-defined calculation with agreed-upon filters and aggregations. When your finance team updates th

I've been hearing the word "harness" thrown around a lot lately. I assumed it just meant "the IDE" or...

An agent moving through a multi-step task needs two things it doesn't automatically have: a reliable way to know when the task is actually finished, and a reliable way to recognize when its current approach isn't working. Without both, the agent has no internal alarm bell. It just keeps acting — and if the same action keeps producing the same unhelpful result, nothing tells it to stop, change course, or ask for help. This isn't a minor implementation detail. It's a structural gap in how most agent loops are built: observe, decide, act, observe again. That loop has no natural exit condition unless one is explicitly designed in. Pattern One: The Retry Loop : The retry loop is the simpler of the two failure modes. The agent takes an action, it fails, and the agent tries the exact same action again — sometimes with trivial variation — expecting a different outcome. A few reasons this happens: Misread failures : The agent doesn't correctly interpret why the action failed, so it can't adjust its approach. It just repeats the attempt. No failure memory : Without a persistent record of "I already tried this and it didn't work," the agent has nothing to check against before trying again. Overconfidence in the plan : If the agent's internal reasoning treats the original plan as correct, it may conclude the execution was the problem, not the plan — and simply re-execute. The result is a kind of insanity loop: identical input, identical output, repeated until a turn limit, budget cap, or timeout finally intervenes from the outside. Pattern Two: Oscillation : Oscillation is subtler and, in some ways, more dangerous, because it can look like activity rather than failure. The agent doesn't repeat the same action — it alternates between two (or more) states, undoing its own progress each cycle. A classic example : An agent editing a file makes a change, then in a later step "fixes" that change back to something close to the original, believing it's correcting an error. The next cyc

Aina is going to pilot a new device in the coming weeks.

Building an AI agent with n8n is the fastest, cheapest way to turn a large language model into a useful worker — if you stay within its sweet spot. The honest truth, informed by the custom agents we ship, is that n8n carries a well-scoped agent further than most people expect. An LLM node, a few tool/webhook nodes and a trigger are all you need. This guide walks you through that exact workflow and, just as importantly, names the precise moment n8n stops cutting it and a custom build must take over. What You Need Before You Start You'll need a running n8n instance (self-hosted or cloud) and API keys for the services you want to integrate. Grab a Gemini or OpenAI key from their respective developer consoles — n8n's official AI agent builder documentation lists the full compatibility. The quick-start template also gives you a one-click import to see an agent's skeleton immediately. How to Build an AI Agent with n8n: The Core Workflow The core is a chain of nodes: a trigger wakes the agent, an LLM node reasons, and tool/webhook nodes take action. That's the entire pattern. Here's how to assemble it. Set the trigger Drag a Webhook node onto the canvas if you want the agent called via HTTP, or a Schedule node to run it periodically. For our example, we'll use a webhook that receives a customer question. Add the LLM node Attach an OpenAI Chat Model (or Gemini) node. In the node's parameters, craft a system prompt that scopes the agent. For a support bot, something like: You are a helpful support agent for our SaaS product. Use the tools provided to answer questions. If you don't know, say you need human help. This prompt is the boundary of the agent's autonomy. Keep it specific — vagueness leads to hallucinations. Attach tool and webhook nodes Here's where n8n shines. Drag a Function node to run custom JavaScript (e.g., querying a database) or a HTTP Request node to call an external API. Wire them as "tools" by connecting them to the LLM node's tool output. In the LLM node

Repo: https://github.com/voku/agent-loop Demo: https://voku.github.io/agent_loop_demo/ Your Coding Agent Doesn’t Need More Memory. It Needs a Governed Loop. Coding agents repeat mistakes. The obvious response is to give them more memory: MEMORY.md project-rules.md agent-notes.md lessons-learned.md MEMORY_FINAL.md Soon the agent receives old decisions, temporary workarounds, copied transcripts, abandoned ideas, and rules nobody remembers approving. It has more context. It does not necessarily have better context. At some point, memory becomes landfill. The problem is not that coding agents forget too much. The problem is that most workflows fail to distinguish between temporary context, evidence, proposed learning, and approved project guidance. A transcript is not memory. A note is not a rule. A finding is not guidance. And a successful patch is not automatically a project convention. Instead of giving the agent one growing pile of context, I built voku/agent-loop around a governed workflow: task -> approved plan -> selective recall -> implementation -> verification -> recorded evidence -> reviewed learning Start with approved scope A coding agent should not begin by reading a ticket and creatively filling in everything the ticket forgot to mention. It should begin with an explicit work brief: goal; permitted scope; non-goals; affected files; required validation; human approval. For example: vendor/bin/agent-loop workflow plan PROJECT-123 \ --by lars \ --learning-root infra/doc/agent-learning \ --file src/Order/OrderService.php \ --file tests/Order/OrderServiceTest.php \ --goal "Reject invalid order state transitions" \ --scope "Order state validation and its tests" \ --non-goal "Do not redesign the order aggregate" \ --validate "composer phpstan" \ --validate "composer test" A human then approves that specific revision: vendor/bin/agent-loop workflow approve PROJECT-123 --by lars When the plan changes, the old revision becomes superseded , and the new one requires

Part 1 of "Multi-Agent Systems in Production: What They Don't Tell You" — a four-part series...

Gwen Shapira shares how teams are scaling AI features using PostgreSQL for mission-critical apps. She explains how to leverage Postgres's multi-modal capabilities - including JSONB parsing and high-recall HNSW vector indexing - to deliver deterministic and semantic context to LLMs. She also discusses vector quantization to speed up queries by 4x and strategies for managing agentic memory. By Gwen Shapira

Everyone talks about prompts memory RAG But production issues were actually loops false completion replay retries wrong tool non deterministic execution Here are the top 7. That's what led us to build Failproof AI not because we wanted another framework, but because we kept seeing the same reliability problems across every framework.

How a distributed, event-sourced issue tracker built with developer ergonomics in mind may have a role to play in the next generation of agentic workflows Vision drift Harness engineering has recently popularized the idea of containing architectural drift in agentic workflows. What might be missing in the discussion is a similar issue on a higher level - vision drift . By vision drift I mean that the implementation no longer drifts only from the architecture - it drifts from the original product intent. And it seems like the risk may be obscured by restricted tooling. As long as the project management tools only present a snapshot rather than a traceable story, there is an increased risk of undetected drift. Drift is detected via specification audits over time. However, while code history easily can be traversed via Git, issue tracking essentially lacks this capability. Issue trackers tend to be excellent at answering the question “what is going on right now?”, but fail at answering the question “how did our work in this area evolve last month?” or “what went on this time last year?”, or “how did we get from there to there?”. Workflow audits When I set off to build Epiq, this was not a concern on my radar. Agentic coding was something I had heard distant rumors of, and in fact I was just pursuing the ideal developer experience . This pursuit did however lead me down a path of unorthodox architecture, which in turn resulted in an issue tracker with some uncommon properties. One of these is the ability to inspect historical state by time-traveling, and replay sequences. I have not yet encountered another issue tracker with these capabilities. Initially I thought of it as a gimmick feature. Imagine the wow-factor of replaying the entire sprint in a retro, visualizing the past 2 weeks as a short movie. I thought it would help out with reflection of how much (or little) work had been accomplished. Not until I set out to do my own first fully agent-implemented feature did

Last year my team had to pick a coding agent, and I volunteered to run the evaluation. I felt good about it. I pulled up the public benchmark scores, lined up the contenders, took the one at the top, and told everyone we had a winner. Then we actually pointed it at our repo. It did not blow up dramatically. It just kept being slightly wrong in ways that ate our time. It wrote diffs our reviewers would not approve. It renamed a function and broke three files it had never opened. The tests it ran passed, and the repo was still broken. I had confidently recommended a tool based on a number that turned out to say almost nothing about our situation. That was embarrassing enough that I went and figured out why. It took a few weeks of reading and a couple more bad calls before I landed on something that works. This is that, written plainly, and I hope it saves you the meeting where you have to walk your recommendation back. Why the benchmark score lied to me The score was not fake. It was just measuring somebody else's code. Once I looked properly, four gaps explained the whole thing: The agent might have already seen the answers. The problems in these public benchmarks are old. Models were very likely trained on the actual fixes used to grade them. So the score partly measures memory, not problem-solving. The setup is nothing like real work. A benchmark gives the agent a clean repo, one clear issue, and one command to run the tests. My engineers give it a half-open editor, a messy branch, a Slack thread, and a reviewer comment. Completely different job. Our codebase has its own habits. Our internal libraries, our wrappers, our test style, the imports we ban. No benchmark knows any of that, so an agent can write textbook-perfect code that our reviewers still reject on sight. The bar for passing is way lower. A benchmark passes a patch if the broken test now passes. My team passes a patch if it does that, and does not break unrelated tests, does not reformat the whole file,

Your AI Agent Needs Tracing, Not Just Logs You've probably already called an LLM from a Node.js backend. That part's easy — every provider ships a solid SDK. The part that actually trips people up is what happens after : turning that one API call into an agent that reasons, uses tools, loops a few times, and still behaves once real users are hitting it. Here's a small, honest pattern for that — plus the one thing most tutorials skip: making the loop debuggable. Why Node.js is doing this job Node has quietly become the default home for the application layer around AI. It's become the preferred middle layer for deploying modern AI agents, wrapping heavier model inference behind fast Node APIs. Python still owns training and the heavy orchestration frameworks — Node owns the gateway, the auth, the streaming UI, and the business logic wrapped around all of it. On the SDK side, things consolidated fast: OpenAI's Node SDK holds roughly a third of weekly npm downloads across the major JS AI SDKs, and Anthropic's TypeScript SDK has grown nearly tenfold in a year. And despite all the framework noise, most production teams just use the Claude or OpenAI SDK directly — reaching for LangChain.js or Mastra only once multi-agent coordination actually earns its keep. The loop: reason, act, repeat Almost every "agent" in 2026 runs on the same loop: reason about the task, act through a tool call, look at what came back, reason again — repeat until done. That's it. The engineering is in the guardrails around it, not the loop itself. // agent.js import Anthropic from " @anthropic-ai/sdk " ; const anthropic = new Anthropic (); // reads ANTHROPIC_API_KEY from env const tools = [ { name : " get_order_status " , description : " Look up the status of a customer order by order ID. " , input_schema : { type : " object " , properties : { orderId : { type : " string " } }, required : [ " orderId " ], }, }, ]; async function getOrderStatus ({ orderId }) { // stand-in for a real DB/service call r

Google released the Genkit Agents API in preview for TypeScript and Go. The open-source framework packages message history, tool loops, streaming, and state persistence behind a single chat() interface. Detached turns let agents work after clients disconnect. Interruptible tools provide human-in-the-loop control with anti-forgery validation on resume. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

When building multi-agent systems, rigid state graphs quickly fall apart in the face of dynamic user inputs. Imagine building a smart assistant: a user hands you a checklist of three household chores today, but tomorrow it might be a list of ten software debugging tasks. Because the number of tasks, their sequence, and their execution details are entirely runtime-dependent, you cannot hardcode this path at design time. Forcing dynamic lists of work into a static graph-based workflow can lead to fragile, over-engineered code. You need a workflow that adapts dynamically at runtime. The Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) provides a flexible programming model to define dynamic workflows . With the release of ADK 2.4.0 , triggering these workflows has become even more seamless: you can register a Workflow directly in an agent's tools list, allowing the coordinator agent to execute it automatically as a first-class tool. In this article, you learn how to configure and trigger a dynamic workflow directly from a coordinator agent. This guide uses a task list coordination example, but you can adjust this pattern to other dynamic orchestration needs. The architecture of a dynamic workflow Static workflows define the execution path at design time. Dynamic workflows, however, allow agents to invoke tools, spawn other nodes, and schedule sub-agents conditionally at runtime. The system consists of three main components: Root agent ( root_agent ) : Gathers the list of tasks from the user, requests final approval, and directly calls the tasks_workflow tool. The workflow ( tasks_workflow ) : A Workflow that iterates over the approved tasks. Sub-agent ( task_explainer ) : An Agent tasked with generating a step-by-step execution plan for each task. Here is the architectural diagram of the solution: Technical implementation Let's break down how to implement this solution using the Google ADK library in Python. The complete code resides in the devrel-demos repository with core logic in

An activity log tells us what an agent did. A decision log should also tell us what it considered and rejected. Without rejected options, a later reviewer sees a clean path that never existed: model B was selected, the task restarted, the result succeeded. Missing are the reasons model A was unsuitable, why staying put was worse, and what new evidence would change the choice. That information matters for trust and recovery. It lets people challenge a decision without reconstructing the entire session. Execution history is necessary, but different The MonkeyCode model-switch record at commit c58bcd4 stores the task and user, from/to model IDs, request ID, whether to load the session, success, message, session ID, and timestamps. The switch use case creates that switch record, restarts the task with the target configuration, and records the result. That is valuable execution history. It answers “what switch was requested and what happened?” The expanded rejected-options structure below is my design proposal , not a claim about MonkeyCode's current schema or interface. Add the decision before the outcome A reusable record can separate choice from execution: { "decision_id" : "task-42-model-switch-7" , "context" : "The task needs the required tool-call contract." , "chosen" : { "option" : "model-b" , "reason" : "Passed the declared capability contract" , "evidence" : [ "evaluation/capability-model-b.json" ] }, "rejected" : [ { "option" : "model-a" , "reason" : "Required tool-call case failed" , "evidence" : [ "evaluation/capability-model-a.json" ], "revisit_when" : "Adapter version changes" } ], "execution" : { "request_id" : "req-switch-7" , "result" : "success" , "session_id" : "session-9" } } The key field is revisit_when . “Rejected” should not mean universally bad. It should mean unsuitable under a specific context and evidence set. Design the interface for progressive disclosure Do not paste this JSON into the main task timeline. Use three layers: Timeline: Switch

📖 TL;DR GPT-5.6 shipped July 9, 2026 in three tiers Sol (flagship), Terra (balanced), and Luna (cheapest) all tuned for agentic tool calling. All three share a 1M-token context window , 128K max output, and native MCP support in the Responses API. Test any MCP server against Sol, Terra, or Luna in MCP Agent Studio — pick the model, connect a server, and watch each tool call live. OpenAI dropped GPT-5.6 on July 9, 2026 - and this one is aimed squarely at agents. Three models landed at once: Sol , Terra , and Luna . Each is built to call tools, not just chat . That makes testing MCP servers with GPT-5.6 a different exercise than testing a plain chat model. Tool selection is the whole game. I have spent this week pointing all three at MCP servers GitHub, Postgres, Playwright, and multi-server setups. This post is what I learned. You will see which tier to run for which workload , how the new tool-calling features change MCP, and how to test each one free in your browser. Skip it and you will overpay for Sol on jobs Luna handles fine. What Is GPT-5.6? Sol, Terra, and Luna Explained GPT-5.6 is a three-tier model family, not a single model. OpenAI split it by cost and horsepower so you match the model to the job. Here is the lineup, straight from OpenAI's pricing page: Model Built for Input / Output (per 1M) GPT-5.6 Sol Flagship — ambitious agentic work $5.00 / $30.00 GPT-5.6 Terra Balanced — efficient, high-volume work $2.50 / $15.00 GPT-5.6 Luna Fast, affordable — everyday work $1.00 / $6.00 The specs are shared across all three. Every tier gets a 1M-token context window, 128K max output, and a February 16, 2026 knowledge cutoff. So the choice is not about context or capability limits. It is about how much reasoning each task actually needs. New to the protocol these models call? Start with what is Model Context Protocol , then come back. Why GPT-5.6 Changes MCP Tool Calling Here is the part that matters for MCP. GPT-5.6 does not just call tools one at a time it can orc

TL;DR — This article is going to be jam-packed with useful information, tips, tricks and hacks for setting up an agentic development in the Google ecosystem. This one isn’t really about the FinOps! Welcome to Part 2 Welcome back, friends! In the first part , I described the purpose of the FinSavant FinOps solution, the motivation for creating it, its overall architecture and tech stack, and how it works. In this part, we’ll use FinSavant as a case study in how to set up a development environment for the purposes of building such an ADK-based agentic solution. Even if you’re not particularly interested in FinSavant itself, I hope you’ll find a bunch of useful information and tips here that will help you build your own agentic solutions more effectively and quickly. We’ll cover: Using Antigravity IDE Overall project workspace structure Setting up agent skills for your coding agent My project’s GEMINI.md (or if you prefer, AGENTS.md ) My documentation approach Setting up MCP servers for your coding agent, such as BigQuery MCP Scaffolding the initial ADK agent using Google Agents CLI and its supporting skill Getting started with a Makefile Sound good? Let’s get cracking! Series Orientation Let’s see where we are in this series. Goals, Architecture, and Tech Stack: Capabilities, project goals, target architecture, technology stack, and design decisions. Development Environment Setup, Google Antigravity, MCPs and Skills, and ADK Bootstrapping with Agents CLI 📍 You are here. Building the ADK Agent and API Designing and Building the UI with Google Stitch and A2UI Deployment with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Agent Runtime, Cloud Run and IAP Automating Deployment with CI/CD and Terraform Agent Observability, Evaluation, and Tuning with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform Getting Started with Antigravity IDE These days, my favourite coding environment for any significant project is Antigravity IDE. This is Google’s agent-first integrated development environment. You get a lo

For about 3 months I've been running an autonomous agent — one that thinks up and writes its own social media posts and comments — unattended, 4 sessions daily, on a 16GB M1 Mac with small models in the 9B / E4B class. I'm about to publish what that operation taught me about hardening, as a series of 4 technical articles. Before that, there's one thing I want to write down first: why small models . I've been to the purchase page for a Mac Studio or a new MacBook Pro more than once or twice. Backing the agent with a large cloud model (Opus or the GPT family) has always been an option in the code. And yet I haven't bought, and I haven't switched. The 16GB M1 is not an economic constraint — it's a constraint I chose . From the outside, building on small models looks like a cheap compromise. This article explains why it isn't, and states where I stand. It also serves as the hub for the 4-article series. A model's intelligence hides the roughness of your design Large models absorb sloppy prompts, ambiguous instructions, and missing guards with sheer intelligence. If all you want is to ship a product, that's a virtue. But if you want to become someone who can build things , it becomes a defect. Because inside the thing that worked, you can no longer tell where your design ends and the model's intelligence begins. "It worked" and "I built it" are different things. Something you bludgeoned into working with model capability counts as a thing that ran — it doesn't become the ability to build. Small models have no absorption capacity. So every design flaw comes to the surface. In my operation, all of the following surfaced: The context window being silently truncated Outputs cut off midway A runaway caused by one missing sampling parameter In cloud or large-model environments, these rarely bother you. The environment has cushioning built in. Context windows are in the 200K–1M token class, so truncation itself rarely happens. And when you do exceed the limit, you get an explic

Builder Journal · ARC Prize 2026 There is a specific horror in a detective story when you realize the witness everyone trusted has been lying, or just wrong, the whole time, and every conclusion built on their testimony has to come down with them. I had that moment with my own notes this month. The unreliable witness was me. Context, if you are new to this thread : I'm competing in the ARC Prize 2026, building an agent that has to win games it has never seen. It had been stuck, underperforming on the hidden test in a way I could see on the scoreboard but could not explain, and I had been hunting the cause across several sessions. The two comforting facts In two earlier work sessions I had written down, as settled conclusions, two things about why the agent was failing. One: the failure was a kind that only happens on the hidden online games, so it could not be taken apart and studied on my own machine. Two: the practice games I did have were useless for investigating it anyway, because they scored a flat zero on the relevant measure. Notice what those two beliefs do when you put them together. They say, in a calm and reasonable voice, that there is nothing to be done here. The problem is unreachable, the practice data is a dead end, the smart move is to spend your energy elsewhere. They were not just facts. They were permission to stop looking. So I stopped looking. Twice. The hour that knocked it all down Eventually I made myself do the one thing I had been quietly avoiding. Instead of rereading my own notes for the third time, I went and checked. I wrote small probes and ran them against the real artifacts, the actual code and the actual game data, rather than against my memory of what they did. Both beliefs collapsed inside an hour. The failure was not unreachable. It came apart cleanly, deterministically, on the games I already had sitting on my disk. And the "dead end" practice data was not a dead end at all. It showed the problem plainly the moment I asked it

The problem Websites have SSL certificates. Browsers verify them. Users trust them. It's the foundation of the web. AI agents have nothing . When Agent A connects to Agent B: ❌ No way to verify B's identity (anyone can impersonate) ❌ No way to check B's trustworthiness (no audit, no reputation) ❌ No encryption (messages are plaintext) ❌ No standard payment method ❌ No way to translate between frameworks (LangChain ≠ AutoGen) So I built ATC — Agent Trust Card . What is ATC? ATC is like an SSL certificate + passport + credit card for AI agents, all in one: Identity — Cryptographically signed by MarketNow (we're the Certificate Authority) Trust — Contains a Sentinel security audit score (0-10) Encryption — Contains an Ed25519 public key for end-to-end encrypted messaging Translation — Specifies the agent's framework; MarketNow translates between them Payment — Contains a USDC wallet address for autonomous payments How it works Agent A generates Ed25519 keypair ↓ Agent A requests ATC from MarketNow ↓ MarketNow runs Sentinel audit → signs ATC ↓ Agent A presents ATC when connecting to Agent B ↓ Agent B verifies A's ATC signature (using MarketNow's CA public key) ↓ Agent B checks A's trust score (rejects if below threshold) ↓ They communicate — end-to-end encrypted ↓ Agent A pays Agent B — USDC with escrow ↓ Both rate each other — trust scores update The code # Request an ATC POST https://marketnow.site/api/atc { "action" : "issue" , "agent_id" : "agent.yourorg.yourname" , "agent_name" : "Your Agent" , "public_key" : "Ed25519 public key" , "capabilities" : [ "web_scraping" ] , "protocol_language" : "langchain" , "wallet_address" : "0x..." } # Verify an ATC GET https://marketnow.site/api/atc?action = verify&card_id = ATC-2026-00001 # Get CA public key (for signature verification) GET https://marketnow.site/api/atc?action = ca-key What makes ATC different from existing solutions Feature AgentID Agent Passport IBM ACP Stripe ACP ATC Cryptographic identity ✅ ✅ ❌ ❌ ✅ Security a