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 — page 3 of this archive.
Which Agentic posts are in this archive?
AI Agents Why does my agent keep calling the same failed tool
Your agent retries one failed tool because nothing fingerprints the call or caps same-tool executes. Escalate auth and policy on first hit — do not grind.
AI Agents State Machines for Agent Loops: Determinism Where It Matters
Give the model freedom inside a named state. Legal transitions, revision ceilings, and escalate paths keep operations deterministic when tokens are not.
AI Agents MCP vs Native Function Calling: Portability Tax vs Shortest Loop
Native function calling wins for one app's short tool loop; MCP earns the tax when tools must be shared and governed across hosts—not a LangChain swap.
AI Agents RAG That Does Not Lie: Retrieval Contracts for Business Knowledge
Retrieval is search, not truth. Production RAG needs corpus rules, citations, refuse-on-empty, and contradiction handling — or the agent invents policy.
AI Agents LangGraph vs CrewAI vs a Custom Loop: Choose Control, Not Fashion
Choose LangGraph, CrewAI, or a custom loop by control and durability, then prove the pick on one golden set and a fixed cost band—not fashion rankings.
AI Agents Agent Memory Patterns: What to Persist, What to Forget
Agent memory is three stores, not a bigger window: working dies with the run, episodic is searchable history, and the store holds approved facts only.
AI Agents Golden Sets from Production Failures: Turn Bad Runs into Regression Fuel
Turn a bad production agent run into a regression test: harvest the trace, stub the tools, write the expected terminal, and gate deploys on that fixture.
AI Agents Multi-Agent Handoffs Without Lost Context
More agents are not maturity. Typed handoff packages — goal, artifacts, failures, remaining budget — keep context without a shared contaminated transcript.
AI Agents Prompt Injection for Tool Agents: Stop Text from Becoming Actions
Stop prompt injection by isolating untrusted email and tickets from write tools, then gating every proposed call in code — never in the system prompt.
AI Agents Cost Controls for Agent Fleets: Budgets, Caps, and Kill Switches
Control agent-fleet cost with runner-enforced caps, policy-versioned prompt caches, and state-based model routing — not a prompt that says to be frugal.
AI Agents Idempotent Agent Tool Writes: Retries Without Double Emails or Double Charges
Timeouts are unknown, not failed. Mint one runtime idempotency key per write intent and reuse it across retries so you cannot double-email or double-charge.
AI Agents The Fractional AI CTO Model: When You Need Architecture, Not Another Chatbot
A fractional AI CTO owns architecture, evaluation standards, and a deploy gate — not a chatbot retainer. Hire one when colliding initiatives lack rails.
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.