Your agent loop needs a budget, not a better prompt
Unbounded loops fail slowly and expensively. Treat steps, tokens, and time as product-level limits.
Evaluation
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The trace is the artifact
If you cannot replay how an agent reached an answer, you cannot debug it, evaluate it, or improve it.
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Agents
Chip Huyen's survey of agent architecture, planning, tool use, and the gaps between demos and production.
Why we recommend it The section on evaluation and failure modes is the part worth re-reading. It explains why agent demos look better than agent products, with the least hype of anything written that month.
Chip Huyen
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Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
Simon Willison's year-in-review on model capabilities, costs, and what actually changed.
Why we recommend it The most useful annual snapshot of model progress, written for practitioners rather than investors. The cost and capability comparisons are the parts worth bookmarking.
Simon Willison