Spurlock Studios
Contact
AI Agents

Agentic posts from Will's Journal.

These are the Agentic posts from Will's Journal — writing from this practice, not the Agentic service page.

The Agentic practice: The night shift that does not invent a price.

Which Agentic posts are in this archive?

Approved-copy binder and a violet STOP plate — the agent’s fence. AI Agents

Budtender FAQ that will not invent a strain benefit

A floor FAQ agent answers hours, pickup rules, and SKUs from approved copy — then hard-stops before inventing a medical claim or a COA.

6 MIN
Two clipped paper packets. Thesis: SHOULD AGENT ESCALATE INSTEAD RETRYING. AI Agents

When should the agent escalate instead of retrying

Escalate on auth, policy, ambiguous intent, repeated same-tool fail, and money movement. Retry only transient, idempotent tool errors with a hard bound.

26 MIN
A small text-file card with no glyphs. Thesis: AGENT 10 MORE EXPENSIVE THAN. AI Agents

Why is my agent 10× more expensive than the chatbot demo

Agents cost more than the chatbot demo because each tool turn re-bills growing context, schemas, and retries. 10× is a complaint to diagnose, not a statistic.

34 MIN
A violet ring. Thesis: WHO ACCOUNTABLE AGENT ACTS REFUNDS. AI Agents

Who is accountable when an agent acts (refunds, emails, writes)

A named human owns every agent refund, email, and write. Policy gates sit before irreversible tools; the model is not a person and cannot absorb the blame.

31 MIN
A small stack of coins. Thesis: PASS RATE LIES REVISION RATE. AI Agents

Why Pass Rate Lies: Revision Rate, Trajectories, and Coverage

Pass rate flatters bad agents. Gate deploys on revision rate, trajectory scores, eval coverage, and cost per successful task—not a single green percentage.

25 MIN
A scuffed work smartphone with a blank glowing circular button. Thesis: AGENTS LOOP FAILED TOOLS PROGRESS. AI Agents

Why Agents Loop on Failed Tools: No-Progress Detection Beats Longer Prompts

Agents loop on failed tools because the harness never detects no-progress. Fingerprint calls, honor retryable:false, cap turns, terminate with a reason code.

22 MIN
A violet ring. Thesis: AGENTIC SYSTEMS OPERATING MANUAL MULTI. AI Agents

Agentic Systems: An Operating Manual for Multi-Agent Work That Ships

An agentic system is evaluators, policy gates, sandboxes, and kill switches — not a chat window — so production tool work survives contact with real data.

32 MIN
Nested brass frames. Thesis: AGENT DEMOS DIE PRODUCTION CONTROL. AI Agents

Why Agent Demos Die in Production: Control Gaps, Not Model IQ

Demo success proves a staged happy path. Production fails when the control loop — schemas, auth, evaluators, and kill switches — was never in the harness.

24 MIN
A cracked amber fuse. Thesis: BROKE TRIED EVALUATE AI AGENT. AI Agents

What broke when I tried to evaluate an AI agent in production

Production eval failed on four fronts: no gold labels, biased samples, judge drift, eval tools that wrote. Isolate the harness before you trust the live score.

29 MIN
A violet ring. Thesis: BUILD EVALUATOR BEFORE AGENT. AI Agents

Build the Evaluator Before the Agent

If the judge shares the worker's context, you are grading your own homework. Build criteria, evidence, and ceilings first — then grant real tool autonomy.

22 MIN
A violet ring. Thesis: EVALUATOR PRODUCT. AI Agents

The Evaluator Is the Product

Agent accuracy did not come from a better prompt or a bigger model. It came from separating the thing that does the work from the thing that judges it.

12 MIN
A small stack of coins. Thesis: KNOW IF AI AGENT ACTUALLY. AI Agents

How do I know if my AI agent is actually working

You know an AI agent is working when rewrite rate, policy denials, cost, and time-to-done hold. Thumbs and CSAT hide unpaid human editors on real writes.

25 MIN
FAQ

What should I know about this Agentic archive?

What is this Agentic archive?
These are the Agentic posts from Will's Journal — writing from this practice, not the Agentic service page.
Is this the Agentic service page?
No. This is a journal lane archive. The Agentic practice is at /agentic. The night shift that does not invent a price.