24 posts tagged with "agentic-patterns"

Kevin Liao's essay Agents Don't Need Memory. They Need Documentation. argues that memory plugins for coding agents are just retrieval: snippets cut from old transcripts, picked by similarity and pushed into every prompt. His alternative, operator-memory, is a set of Markdown documents the agent reads before a task and updates after it. I agree with most of his diagnosis. It describes a memory system I work on. What his answer leaves out is a way to know whether a document is still true.

When Deciding Gets Cheap argued that cheap AI decisions spread into the situations where their confidence means least. Nobody disagrees with that. Every engineer I have said it to nods, means it, and goes back to a system that trusts model output anyway. The gap is not conviction. It is arithmetic.

Two Kinds of Hard argued that agents collapsed the cost of producing output while the cost of judgment did not move at all. A new class of model now goes after judgment directly. It does not write anything. It picks one answer from a list you define, says how sure it is, and does that in thirty milliseconds.