标签：#agentskills

Your AI agent is confident. It points to line 42 of PaymentService.java . "There's your null pointer exception." You check. Line 42 is a comment. The code was refactored 14 commits ago. The production crash happened 3 hours ago . Your agent just spent 45 minutes debugging ghosts . The Problem: Agents Are Stuck in the Present Every AI coding agent today — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Cody, you name it — operates on the same assumption: The code that matters is at HEAD . But production bugs don't live at HEAD . They live in the commit that was running when the crash happened. That commit is buried under hotfixes, refactors, dependency updates, and feature merges that landed after the incident. HEAD (now) ← Agent analyzes THIS │ ├─ feat: add new payment provider ├─ refactor: extract UserService ├─ fix: handle edge case in checkout ├─ chore: update dependencies │ ▼ a1b2c3d (3 hours ago) ← Bug ACTUALLY lives HERE Your agent confidently finds bugs in code that didn't exist when the crash occurred . The Insight: Git Already Has Time Travel We don't need a time machine. Git has had one for years: git worktree . # Get the commit from 3 hours ago git log --before = "3 hours ago" -1 --format = "%H" # → a1b2c3d4e5f6... # Create an isolated, read-only snapshot at that commit git worktree add /tmp/debug-a1b2c3d a1b2c3d # Now analyze the historical codebase cat /tmp/debug-a1b2c3d/src/PaymentService.java # Clean up when done git worktree remove --force /tmp/debug-a1b2c3d This gives you: ✅ Isolated — doesn't touch your working directory ✅ Parallel — can have multiple historical snapshots simultaneously ✅ Disposable — cleanup is one command ✅ Zero deps — pure Git, works everywhere The Missing Piece: Teaching Agents When to Time-Travel Agents already know git log , git show , git diff , cat , grep . They can analyze code perfectly. What they struggle with : Fuzzy time → commit resolution — "last night", "v2.4.1", "the deploy before the hotfix" Worktree lifecycle management — create,

AI coding agents are now part of the developer workflow. Whether we like that shift or hate it, users...

I hate presenting. Not the prep, not the content, the actual moment of unmuting, sharing my screen, and narrating 20 slides to a wall of black camera squares, having no idea if anyone's actually listening or just quietly making lunch. So a couple weekends ago I went down a rabbit hole and built something to get me out of that. It's called Meeting Presenter. It's an AI skill that joins the call and presents the deck for you. You just... sit there. Steer it if you feel like it. Or don't. What it actually does You hand it a deck, it joins the meeting, shares its screen, and talks through the slides on its own. Not in a flat text-to-speech way either, it walks through the content more like a person explaining it than a bot reading bullet points. The part that actually got me hooked, though, wasn't the presenting, it's that you don't even need a finished deck to use it. If you've got a PowerPoint or PDF already, it'll just present that. If you've only got some rough notes, it'll turn those into slides first. And if you've got nothing but a vague idea, you can hand it a single sentence and it'll build the deck from scratch before presenting it. Which means the laziest possible version of this is: think up a topic five minutes before standup, type it in, and let it build and present the thing while you drink your coffee. I'm not proud of how often I've already done this. Setting it up Took me less than 10 minutes, most of which was making coffee while it installed. Grab a free API key from agentcall.dev - no lengthy signup, just a few seconds. Install it. Two options depending on how hands-on you want to be: Recommended: paste the GitHub repo link to your coding agent and tell it to install it. It clones and sets everything up for you. Or clone it manually and run it with your meeting link and deck. No config files to hand-edit. What it's actually like on a call It joins like any other participant, and it asks before it starts presenting rather than just barging in mid-mee

Cursor has spent the past week in headlines after confirming a partnership with SpaceX that could eventually lead to a $60 billion acquisition . The deal, for now, centres on training more capable coding models using SpaceX’s compute infrastructure. Alongside that push on model performance, however, Cursor is now addressing a separate issue: the reliability of the code those models produce. Cursor has partnered with Chainguard , which provides verified open-source packages, to route dependencies through its curated repositories, aiming to reduce the risk of compromised components entering AI-built applications. The announcement lands as AI coding tools push more software into production with less human review, raising questions about how much of that code can be trusted. Supply chain risks in the agentic era The partnership addresses a problem developers know all too well. Modern applications depend heavily on open-source libraries and container images, most of which are pulled from public registries such as npm, PyPI, and Docker Hub. Those registries operate on openness, with limited checks in place. Developers — and now AI agents — often install dependencies without knowing who built them or whether they have been tampered with. Recent incidents have underlined the risk . In March, projects such as Trivy, LiteLLM, Telnyx, and Axios were compromised, with attackers using poisoned packages to steal credentials and spread malware. For teams using AI-generated code, the exposure increases. Agents can select and install dependencies automatically, making trust decisions at a pace that outstrips manual review. As Chainguard co-founder and CEO Dan Lorenc put it, generating code is becoming routine — checking its integrity is where the pressure now sits. “AI agents are making dependency decisions at a scale and speed no security team can manually review,” he wrote in a blog post . “As organizations adopt agentic development, the biggest blocker is no longer how fast code

Engineering teams building with AI agents have largely solved the single-agent problem. The harder challenge arrives when capabilities get split across multiple independently deployed agents — each owned by a different team, each running on its own release cadence. Keeping a coherent conversation alive across those boundaries turns out to be one of the messier architectural questions in production agent systems today, and one that Tessl's own work on context engineering and skill sprawl has been circling from a different angle. Microsoft's Industry Solutions Engineering ( ISE ) team, which embeds with clients on complex technical engagements, has published a detailed account of how they tackled that context problem in a recent engagement. Working with Agent2Agent (A2A ) — an open agent communication protocol originally developed by Google and now maintained by a cross-vendor technical steering committee at the Linux Foundation — they needed coordinator agents to hand off conversational history to domain agents that held no shared infrastructure and no persistent memory. Where the Model Context Protocol ( MCP ) standardises how agents connect to tools and data, A2A operates at a different level : it defines how agents communicate with each other as peers, passing tasks and messages across service boundaries. Shared storage creates dependencies agents shouldn't have Microsoft says it evaluated three core approaches before settling on the one that worked best. The first option entailed domain agents reading from a shared storage layer, using a common identifier to retrieve conversation history. The appeal with this is minimal message size and a single source of truth, but it requires every domain agent to have credentials and connectivity to storage owned by another team — a dependency that becomes unwieldy fast when agents cross organisational lines. A second option makes each domain agent stateful, maintaining its own record of the conversation. However, the operatio

You have seen this loop before. An agent starts a “simple” task, say scrape listings, refactor a repo, research a market, or whatever. It fails, it retries, it re-reads context, it apologizes and tries all over again. Twenty minutes in and the dashboard shows six figures of tokens and zero useful outputs or deliverables. The model did not misbehave on purpose. The orchestrator never had a hard budget gate with an ROI in mind. Skillware v0.4.0 ships a new skill for exactly that gap: monitoring/token_limiter . It lets you monitor and limit any agent’s token budget in real time — Gemini, Claude, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Ollama, custom Python loops, you name it. Same skill, same JSON, any runtime. What Skillware is in a nutshell Skillware is an open registry of installable agent capabilities . Each skill is a bundle: skill.py — deterministic Python ( execute() returns JSON) instructions.md — when the model should call the tool manifest.yaml — schema, constitution, issuer Tests and docs — shipped in the wheel You load by ID, adapt for your provider, call execute() on tool use. The model decides when , the skill decides how , predictably, every time. That split matters for budget control. You do not want the LLM guessing whether it is “allowed” to spend more tokens. You want a small, auditable function that answers: continue, warn, or stop. Meet the Token Limiter This skill is a budget gate , not a kill switch wired into OpenAI or Anthropic. After each model turn, your host loop passes cumulative usage. The skill returns one of three actions: Action Meaning CONTINUE Under the soft threshold — keep going WARN Approaching the limit (default 80%) — tighten scope FORCE_TERMINATE Hard ceiling hit — stop the loop Important nuance: the skill does not cancel API sessions or kill processes. It returns a structured decision. Your orchestrator must act on it. That is by design — Skillware skills stay portable and provider-neutral. No skill-specific API keys. No network calls. Pure Python m

If you've let a coding agent loose on AWS, you've watched it guess. It invents API parameters that don't exist, or hands you an S3 bucket a security review will bounce on sight. The Agent Toolkit for AWS is built to stop that. By the end of this post you'll have it running in whatever editor you use, plus a tour of what's in it and three workflows worth pointing it at. I use Kiro day to day, so I'll walk through that setup first. It also works with Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, and any other agent that speaks MCP, the Model Context Protocol, which is the open standard agents use to connect to outside tools and data. I'll cover those too. What is the Agent Toolkit for AWS? The Agent Toolkit for AWS is a free, AWS-supported set of tools that gives AI coding agents secure access to AWS, current documentation they can read mid-task, and tested procedures for the work they tend to fumble. It plugs into the agent you already use rather than asking you to switch. In practice, that shows up in a few ways, all detailed in the AWS user guide . The agent stops guessing about APIs it never saw. The models behind these agents trained on data that's months or years old, so anything AWS shipped recently is missing or wrong in their heads, and the toolkit hands them current docs and references at request time. For multi-step work like least-privilege IAM or a production serverless stack, it follows a vetted skill instead of reconstructing the steps from half-memory. Every call goes through your own IAM credentials, shows up in CloudWatch, and gets logged to CloudTrail, so you can scope an agent to read-only even when your role can write. And the toolkit costs nothing on its own; you pay only for the AWS resources the agent creates. It's the successor to the MCP servers, skills, and plugins AWS shipped under AWS Labs in 2025. Two things make me reach for it over a raw MCP setup: condition keys that let a policy tell an agent apart from a human, and skills that have been evaluated end

Engineering leaders have spent the past year trying to get their teams to adopt AI coding tools as quickly as possible. Now, a new set of questions has taken over: how do you measure whether any of it is worth the money, and how do you stop agents from running unchecked on production systems? Developer tooling company Warp , an open agentic development environment built from the terminal up, thinks the answer isn't picking a single agent and standardising on it — it's giving teams a way to run several at once, compare them, and govern all of them from a single control plane. As Tessl wrote back in February, orchestration has emerged as a discipline in its own right — a dedicated layer of tooling for coordinating, supervising and directing multiple agents running in parallel. Back in February, Warp launched Oz as a cloud platform for running and managing coding agents at scale. Now, Warp is taking things a step further. In May, the company expanded Oz into what it's calling the first multi-harness control plane — meaning teams can now run Claude Code, Codex and Warp Agent simultaneously through a single interface, rather than committing to any one of them. Tessl caught up with Warp CEO Zach Lloyd to discuss how engineering leaders are thinking about agent fleets, what the harness layer actually changes, and where the lines between autonomy and human oversight are really being drawn. "The wild west": how the agent gold rush became a budget problem Zach spent several years at Google, leading engineering on Docs and Sheets before co-founding photo-editing startup SelfMade . He later served as interim CTO at Time, before founding Warp in 2020, raising north of $70 million in funding from the likes of Sequoia, Google Ventures, Figma co-founder Dylan Field, and Salesforce’s co-founder Marc Benioff. That background — building collaborative tools at Google scale, then navigating the startup world — gives Zach a particular vantage point on how quickly the engineering tooling

Artificial Intelligence has brought the term "AI Agent" into almost every technology conversation. As a result, many people now use the words agent and automation interchangeably. While both are designed to reduce manual work and improve efficiency, they solve problems in fundamentally different ways. Understanding this distinction is essential if you're building software, automating business processes, or deciding where AI fits into your organization. What Is Automation? Automation is designed to execute predefined instructions. You tell the system exactly what to do, in what order, and under what conditions. Every time those conditions are met, it performs the same sequence of actions. For example: A customer submits a form. An email is automatically sent. A record is created in the database. A notification is sent to the sales team. Every step is predetermined. If the process changes, the workflow must be updated. Automation excels at repetitive, predictable tasks where consistency is more important than decision-making. What Is an AI Agent? An AI agent is not focused on following instructions. It is focused on achieving a goal. Instead of executing a rigid sequence of steps, an agent observes its environment, evaluates available information, makes decisions, and adjusts its actions as circumstances change. If one approach fails, it can try another. If new information becomes available, it can revise its strategy without requiring a developer to define every possible scenario in advance. In simple terms: Automation asks: "What steps should I execute?" An agent asks: "What is the best way to accomplish this objective?" This ability to reason and adapt is what makes agents fundamentally different from traditional automation. A Simple Example Imagine you're booking a business trip. An automated workflow might: Book the airline you specified. Reserve the hotel you selected. Email you the itinerary. It completes exactly what it was programmed to do. An AI agent, howev

Most model comparisons ask which model is best. This one starts with a model that never even produced a single result. We tested NVIDIA's open-weight Nemotron family, from the 30B Nano to the 120B Super, on a benchmark of real-world coding tasks: the kind of models an indie developer on a tight budget, or an enterprise cutting inference cost and keeping data in-house, would run. The main finding is that model size is not a dial you turn for a little more quality, it is a threshold. Below a certain capability floor a model cannot drive an agent loop at all, which is why the smallest variant we tried, Nano 12B, produced nothing to score. Above the floor, the question stops being which model is cheapest and becomes which one clears the bar your work actually needs: Nano 30B is an extremely cheap workhorse for narrow, well-scoped jobs, while Super 120B is the size that holds up on demanding multi-step agent work. An agent size floor is the minimum model capacity below which a model cannot reliably complete the act-observe-decide loop an agent depends on. Below it you don't get a slower or sloppier agent, you get a non-agent: a model that reads the task, takes a few steps, and never converges. For anyone choosing a model, this changes the question from "which is cheaper" to "which clears the floor for my work", and that is the question to answer first. Where the numbers come from Every scenario in the evaluation is a real-world agent task tied to a published skill, scored on two axes: instruction-following (does the agent do what it was told, in the way it was told) and task-completion (does it reach the goal). The overall score weights instruction-following at 4 and task-completion at 3, then divides by 7. Each task runs with and without the skill, so the lift from the skill is visible directly. The tasks and skills are public, in the task-evals-for-skills dataset , so you can inspect any scenario yourself. This design is deliberate. The tasks are derived from published

Provisioning a Bedrock RAG knowledge base with S3 Vectors, without the hallucinated API calls. If you've asked an AI coding agent to set up AWS, you've seen it confidently invent a parameter, reach for a deprecated service, or burn ten minutes retrying against a service it never saw in training. The failure mode that bites hardest is the silent one: the agent thinks it succeeded, and you find out an hour later. I hit two of these while standing up the retrieval layer for a LangGraph support bot, an Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Base backed by Amazon S3 Vectors. I'd love to say I caught both with deep AWS expertise. I caught them because the Agent Toolkit for AWS read the docs I hadn't. Both would have shipped, and neither did. The 30-second setup The goal: take a folder of markdown product docs and make them queryable by meaning, so an agent can answer "is this safe for color-treated hair?" from the real docs instead of guessing. Think of it as giving the agent a library it can search instead of making things up. That's the retrieval half of RAG, the foundation a LangGraph agent will later call as a tool. Four moving parts, wrapped in one managed service: Source bucket : an S3 bucket holding the docs. Embeddings : Amazon Titan Text Embeddings V2 (1024-dim vectors). Vector store : Amazon S3 Vectors. I chose it over OpenSearch Serverless because it has no always-on compute, the difference between cents and a monthly surprise for a demo that sits idle. Knowledge Base : Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases ties it together into one thing you can query with a retrieve call. To follow along, you need an AWS account, a non-root IAM identity with credentials configured locally, uv installed, and the toolkit installed in your agent. The fastest path across Kiro, Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex is the AWS CLI installer, aws configure agent-toolkit ; in Kiro you can instead add the AWS MCP Server to .kiro/settings/mcp.json (pin the mcp-proxy-for-aws version) and run npx skills add aws/age

I recently gave a version of this talk at AI Engineer Europe in London. What follows is the fuller story — what we found when we looked at thousands of skills, what goes wrong, and how to fix it. You know that scene in The Matrix? Neo gets a spike in the back of his head, they upload kung fu directly into his brain, and he just... knows it. That's what a skill is for an AI coding agent. You write a markdown file — a SKILL.md — and the agent loads it when the task matches. Suddenly it knows your team's deployment process, or how your API handles pagination, or that you never use semicolons. It's not code. It's context. Procedural knowledge, injected at the right moment. The thing is — Neo's upload worked perfectly. Ours? Not always. Skills are everywhere now We spent some time analysing essentially all of public GitHub. In November last year, 12 repos had SKILL.md files. By March — five thousand four hundred and sixty. That's 450x growth in fourteen weeks. Skills went from zero to 27% of all agent config activity in three months. Faster adoption than CLAUDE.md , AGENTS.md , or any of the dotfile formats before them. And 1 in 12 merged PRs on GitHub now touches an agent config file — 8.4%, up from basically zero eighteen months ago. This is not a niche thing anymore. This is how people are working. Watch on YouTube But are they electrifying? Ninety percent of agent config files are never updated after creation. Write once, forget forever. Your codebase evolves every day. Your dependencies change. Your API contracts shift. But the instructions you gave your agent? Frozen in time. For Gemini files it's even worse — 97% are write-once. And the purpose-built "skill-as-product" repos? Over half are under 50 kilobytes. Wrapper repos. Many are AI-generated. High churn, low staying power. We have this explosion of skills, and most of them are going stale the moment they're committed. What we did about it The DevRel team at Tessl spent a couple of months doing something pretty

When a stronger model ships, there are two questions every skill author should want answered, and evals are the only honest way to answer either: Which skills just got absorbed? A model that now knows how to do X natively does not need a skill telling it to do X. Fewer skills to maintain, leaner context, lower cost. Which skills still matter? Behaviour-level guidance (conventions, preferences, project-specific workflows) is not something pretraining will fill in for you. Those skills should keep paying. Moonshot gave us early access to Kimi K2.6. We ran the Tessl agent skill evaluation harness on the same 21 skills and 100 paired scenarios against three solvers: Kimi K2.5, Kimi K2.6, and Claude Sonnet 4.5. A solver is the model whose output the grader scores; a paired scenario is the same task run twice per solver, once without the skill installed and once with it. These are early signals from one pre-release on one skill set. A deeper cross-model analysis with clean baselines across the board is in progress and will be its own piece. What does our setup look like? Scenarios and rubrics are held fixed across the two Moonshot runs. The only variable is the solver. Solver A: Kimi K2.5 Solver B: Kimi K2.6 Scenario generator: Claude Sonnet 4.5, up to 5 scenarios per skill, derived from each skill's SKILL.md Grader: Claude Sonnet 4.5, weighted-checklist rubric derived from the same SKILL.md Per skill × per solver: every scenario solved twice, baseline (no skill installed) and with-skill Per-skill n=5 is noisy; the aggregate over 100 scenarios is where the signal lives. Three findings: Kimi 2.6 is a better model than K2.5: Without skills, K2.6 sits ~2 pp (percentage points) above K2.5 in aggregate, with double-digit moves on specific skills. Kimi 2.6 holds its own against Sonnet 4.5. We picked Sonnet 4.5 as a competitive baseline, and found in this evaluation set that the K2.6 performed better both in the with/without skill scenario by around ~8 p.p . Skills remain a dura

Google Open Knowledge Format: Why Enterprise Agents Need a Knowledge Layer, Not Just More Tools Most enterprise AI conversations still start in the wrong place. They start with the model. Which model should we use? Which framework should we adopt? Which vendor has the best agent platform? Which tools should we connect next? These are fair questions. But in real enterprise architecture, they are not the hardest questions. The harder question is this: Can our AI systems actually understand how our business works? That is why Google Cloud’s article on Open Knowledge Format caught my attention. The article talks about a simple but important idea: representing knowledge in a way that humans can read and machines can use. In OKF, that means markdown for the content and structured metadata for context. At first glance, that may sound too simple. But that simplicity is the point. Enterprises do not need another place where knowledge goes to die. We already have enough portals, catalogs, wikis, dashboards, folders, and internal tools. What we need is a practical way to package knowledge so it can be reviewed, versioned, governed, searched, and reused by both people and AI agents. That is where this idea becomes very relevant for agentic AI. The Real Enterprise AI Problem Most organizations already have the knowledge their AI agents need. They have it in databases, dashboards, tickets, architecture notes, runbooks, Confluence pages, data catalogs, code comments, incident reports, old project documents, and the heads of experienced employees. The issue is not that knowledge does not exist. The issue is that it is fragmented. Some of it is outdated. Some of it is duplicated. Some of it is tribal. Some of it is locked inside tools. Some of it is written for humans but not structured enough for AI systems to use reliably. This becomes a serious problem when we move from AI assistants to AI agents. An assistant can give a helpful answer. An agent does more. It plans, selects tools

Here is the detailed, deep-dive article tailored for DEV.to, written in a natural, highly technical style, completely free of icons, and designed to resonate with developers building agentic workflows. Building an Autonomous AI Experience Engine: Taming the Multi-Agent CLI Fleet As developers integrate more AI tools into their workflows, a new architectural problem has emerged: agent sprawl. We have incredible tools like Claude, Grok, and Codex running in our terminals, but they operate in silos. They lack shared memory, they step on each other's toes, and coordinating them feels like herding cats. To solve this, I built TechSphereX Studio — an open-source, polyglot AI Experience Engine. It is an autonomous multi-agent platform designed to intercept AI coding actions, orchestrate goal-driven work across a fleet of CLI agents, and mathematically learn from every session to improve future outcomes. Here is a deep dive into how I moved from isolated prompt engineering to a fully automated, self-learning agentic brain. Key Architectural Pillars 1. The 3-Layer Intercept Pipeline Before any CLI executes a command, TechSphereX intercepts the action to determine if the system already knows how to solve the problem based on past experiences. This happens across three highly optimized layers: Layer 1 (Read-only Filter): Evaluates the action in under 1ms. If the action is non-destructive (like a simple read), it skips heavy processing to save resources. Layer 2 (Semantic Search): Uses Qdrant running locally to perform vector embeddings and search the system's history for similar past tasks in under 50ms. Layer 3 (LLM Rerank): Passes the semantic results to a local Ollama instance to filter out contextually irrelevant data in under 500ms, ensuring the execution agent only receives high-fidelity context. 2. The Agentic Brain & Multi-Role Teams Instead of throwing a massive, complex prompt at a single coding agent, TechSphereX mimics a multi-role engineering team. The pipeline st

For months, the most interesting model at Anthropic was one we could not use. Mythos was the internal system the company said was too capable to release, the one that found software vulnerabilities at a level that tripped its own safety thresholds. On June 9, 2026, that tier went public for the first time, as Claude Fable 5. Opus 4.8, the model anchoring production coding agents, suddenly had a successor that's a full capability class above it. This raises two questions for anyone running coding agents. The practical one is whether you should move your fleet from Opus 4.8 to Fable 5. The bigger one is whether a Mythos-class model, the tier Anthropic held back as too capable to ship, lives up to what the name promised. This article answers both, and the numbers tell a more interesting story than the announcement did. We ran both models through the same evaluation, close to 1000 shared scenarios scored twice each, once with no skill supplied and once with the relevant skill in context. The short answer, as of mid-2026, is that Opus 4.8 is still the better value for most agent fleets, and the gap between the Mythos hype and the measured reality is the real story in the data. A Mythos-class model is a tier of Claude that sits above the Opus class in capability . It reaches a threshold Anthropic considers high-risk, particularly at discovering and exploiting software vulnerabilities. Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are the same underlying model with the same capabilities. What separates them is the safeguards: Fable 5 is the public version that ships with safety classifiers, while Mythos 5, restricted to approved partners, runs without them. What the industry expected from a Mythos-class model Before launch, the speculation was not subtle. Across Reddit, X, and a run of explainer posts, Mythos was framed as the model that would change how agents work, not just how well they answer. The recurring predictions clustered around four capabilities: Restructuring a large codebase in one c

title: Your AI Agent Should Not Be Locked to One LLM Provider published: false description: Why serious AI agents need a provider-agnostic architecture, model routing, fallback, and a unified API gateway. tags: ai, llm, agents, architecture Your AI Agent Should Not Be Locked to One LLM Provider Most AI agent prototypes start the same way. You pick one model provider. You install one SDK. You write a few prompts. You add tool calling. You build a demo. It works. Until it does not. The moment you want to try another model, reduce cost, add fallback, improve latency, or support different task types, your simple agent starts turning into a messy collection of provider-specific logic. That is when you realize something important: A real AI agent should not be locked to one LLM provider. If you are building a personal AI agent, coding assistant, research assistant, internal workflow agent, or AI-native product, the model should be replaceable infrastructure — not a hardcoded dependency. The Problem with Single-Provider Agents A simple agent architecture often looks like this: CopyUser ↓ Agent ↓ One LLM Provider ↓ Response This is fine for a proof of concept. But real-world agent systems need more flexibility. Different tasks often need different models: Task Better Model Strategy Quick summarization Fast, low-cost model Complex coding Strong coding model Long document analysis Long-context model Reasoning-heavy planning Reasoning model Multilingual writing Model strong in that language Background automation Cheap and reliable model Production fallback Backup provider If your agent is deeply coupled to one provider, every optimization becomes harder. You cannot easily answer questions like: What happens if the provider is down? What if latency spikes? What if another model is cheaper for simple tasks? What if a new model is better for coding? What if a user wants Claude for writing but GPT for structured reasoning? What if you want to route Chinese tasks to a different mod

A2A has become like a standard for enabling agent to agent communication, we could use the a2a-sdk for running and configuring the a2a server and its features such as agent card, agent skills, agent executor, request handler etc. However we are going to go with a simplified approach here with strands where the agent card will be fetched automatically. Let's get started! Server Initialize a uv project for the a2a server and switch to that directory. uv init ~/strands-a2a-server cd ~/strands-a2a-server Add the required packages. uv add python-dotenv == 1.2.2 strands-agents[a2a] == 1.42.0 Change the code in main.py to look like below. $ cat main . py from dotenv import load_dotenv from strands import Agent from strands.multiagent.a2a import A2AServer load_dotenv () def main (): agent = Agent ( callback_handler = None , description = " A sample strands agent " , model = " us.amazon.nova-micro-v1:0 " , ) a2a_server = A2AServer ( agent = agent ) a2a_server . serve () if __name__ == " __main__ " : main () I like the simplicity here, as you see above, it's quite simple to start a basic a2a server from with in strands, with just a couple of lines of code, we didn't have to install the a2a-sdk separately. Run the code, to start the a2a server. $ uv run main.py INFO: Started server process [18006] INFO: Waiting for application startup. INFO: Application startup complete. INFO: Uvicorn running on http://127.0.0.1:9000 (Press CTRL+C to quit) Client Let's now do the client part on a separate terminal. Initialize the project and switch the directory. uv init ~/strands-a2a-client cd ~/strands-a2a-client Modify main.py code to look as follows. import asyncio from strands.agent.a2a_agent import A2AAgent async def main (): agent = A2AAgent ( endpoint = " http://localhost:9000 " ) agent_card = await agent . get_agent_card () print ( " Invoking remote agent with agent card: " ) for key , value in agent_card : print ( key , " : " , value ) print ( ' - ' * 20 ) while True : prompt = input

Anthropic published a thoughtful guide to making skills. It is worth reading, but it's a map of work you should not have to do. The Claude Code team wrote a piece on how they use agent skills . If you make skills, read it. It is honest and tells you something important: making a good skill is real work. Here's what the guide covers. It sorts skills into nine categories. It explains progressive disclosure, where the agent knows which files to load and when. It covers scripts, config files, combining skills together, and writing the description so the model reaches for the skill at the right moment. All of that is true and useful. It is also a lot to learn. And most of it exists only because you are doing the work by hand. We're SkillsCake . We make and score agent skills all day. So we read this guide a little differently than someone meeting skills for the first time. Here's what we think. Skills are infinite The guide splits skills into types: library reference, verification, and so on. That is a helpful way to teach a class. It is not what a skill actually is. A skill is prose that tells an agent how to do one thing, sometimes with scripts attached. The set of possible skills is not nine boxes. It is every job you could describe in writing; it's infinite. Categories are how a person gets a handle on something that open-ended. They are scaffolding for learning, not the shape of the thing. This matters because the moment you think in categories, you start bending your skill to look like the example in its bucket. Your real job rarely fits the bucket. The best engineered skill is the one written for your exact task, by an expert. Doing it yourself might not be worth it Progressive disclosure, scripts, config, descriptions tuned for the model, gotchas earned by failing, and eval loops: none of that is busywork. It's how a good skill gets built by hand. The guide is not overcomplicating anything. It is being honest about what the manual path costs. But that is the poin

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about why some LLM agents feel "intelligent" while others just feel like chatbots with a slightly better prompt. It almost always comes down to how the system handles memory. When we treat the context window as the only place for state, we hit a ceiling very quickly. To build an actual agent, we have to move away from "one big prompt" and toward a layered memory architecture. Agentic Memory can be categorized in 4 layers by their function: Working Memory: The current context window. It's our RAM—fast, essential, but wiped clean after every session. Semantic Memory: The Vector DB or knowledge base. This is where the "world rules" and global conventions live. It’s the reference manual the agent checks to stay aligned. Procedural Memory: The "how-to" layer. Instead of stuffing every tool description into the prompt, the agent maintains a lean index of skills and pulls in the full implementation only when a specific task triggers it. This keeps the context window clean. Episodic Memory: This is the hardest part. It's the ability to distill a past interaction into a reusable insight. The real engineering challenge here isn't storage—it's the "forgetting" logic. Deciding what is noise and what is a core pattern is where most frameworks still struggle. Depending on the use case, the architecture changes: Reflex Agents: Just Working Memory. Support Agents: Working + Procedural. Coding Agents: The full stack. The gap between a demo and a production-ready agent is usually the distance between simple RAG and a functioning episodic memory. The ability to compress experience into a usable state is still a significant hurdle. Which of these layers are you currently implementing, and how are you handling the "forgetting" logic in your episodic memory?