(Including Language Models and Agents) We often say we want things to be cheaper: services, tools, housing, food. But if we look at how actors, agents, and processes are actually rewarded in our economic systems, there is very little real incentive for anything to become cheaper. In many cases, the system as a whole rewards…

Letting a language model directly change data, call APIs or touch production systems can be powerful, but it is also risky and hard to reason about. A simple pattern to make this safer and more transparent is to separate “deciding what to do” from “actually doing it”. Instead of letting the model perform actions directly,…

When you build agents, or set up several agents and human actors to work together, you have to assume that everything can be misunderstood. Misunderstandings are not rare errors; they are the default. Instructions will be read differently than you intended, roles will be interpreted in surprising ways, and once you chain multiple agents and…