intermediate
12 min read
Agent Loop Budgets: Model Iterations, Cost, and Stopping Risk
A loop that usually finishes in three steps can still spend most of its money on the runs that don't.
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LLM Agents
LLM-driven systems that select actions or tools over one or more steps, including autonomy, state, budgets, and stopping behavior.
Tagged articles
LLM Agents articles
20 articles in this tag.
intermediate
11 min read
Agent Loops, Budgets, and Stopping Rules: How to Bound Autonomy
Here's the scene I've watched play out more times than I can count: someone builds their first agent, gives it a task, and watches it loop. It calls a…
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intermediate
11 min read
Model LLM Agent Permission Risk: Compare Scope, Impact, and Reversibility
Two permission grants land on the review table. One lets the agent read every ticket and send email. The other lets it read assigned tickets and draft…
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intermediate
10 min read
Agent Permissions and Action Boundaries: Keeping Tool Use Bounded and Reversible
The moment you give an agent a tool, you stop deciding what it does and start deciding what it is allowed to do. The real design question is not "can the…
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intermediate
10 min read
Practice Auditing Agent Memory for Stale or Conflicting State
Your agent answered confidently. It was also wrong, and the memory record it trusted was three sessions old.
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intermediate
9 min read
Build and Inspect a Bounded Tool-Using Agent
The agent worked in the demo. Then you ran it on your own task, and it called a tool you never expected — or kept calling tools after the answer was…
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intermediate
11 min read
Common LLM Agent Failures: Loops, Wrong Tools, and Lost Context
Your agent runs. It calls tools. It produces output. And yet, something is wrong—or it never stops running at all. The frustrating part is that you can't…
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intermediate
12 min read
LLM Agent Memory Explained: Context, Retrieval, and Stored State
You build an agent. You chat with it for a few turns. It helps you draft a plan, picks a tool, runs it, reports back. Then you ask: "What was the second…
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intermediate
8 min read
LLM Agents vs Workflows: When Should You Use Each?
You have a task that needs an LLM. The temptation is to reach for an agent—something autonomous, something that "figures it out." But most of the time, a…
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intermediate
7 min read
LLM Portfolio Project Ideas
A portfolio is not a trophy shelf. It is evidence of judgment — proof that you can pick a real problem, make the right tradeoffs, and ship something that…
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intermediate
10 min read
LLM Routing Workflows: Classify the Task Before Choosing a Path
When builders hit a multi-path LLM application, many reach for an agent. That instinct costs them. The real mechanism for most of these systems is a…
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intermediate
10 min read
Model the Cost and Stale-State Risk of Agent Memory
A team sets memory to refresh every six hours to save money. Four hours later, an agent quotes a price, policy, or preference that has already changed. The…
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intermediate
12 min read
Model the Cost of Choosing an Agent or Fixed Workflow
Most teams pick agents or workflows by vibe. The demo looked smart, the diagram looked clean, and nobody wrote down what the choice would cost per run.…
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intermediate
8 min read
Practice Applying Agent Stopping Rules to Loop Traces
You can recite the four dispositions — continue, stop, retry, handoff — and still stare at a raw trace with no idea which one applies. That gap is the…
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intermediate
10 min read
Practice Choosing an Agent Memory Strategy for Each Task
The agent remembered everything and still gave the wrong answer. That is the failure this drill is built to prevent.
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intermediate
14 min read
Practice Reviewing LLM Agent Tool Permissions
A proposed tool call sits on your screen: send the summary to the client. You have a policy document open in another tab. Is this allowed, does it need…
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intermediate
9 min read
Practice Triage: Find the Likely Cause of an LLM Agent Failure
The run failed. The trace is four hundred lines long. Your instinct says the model is dumb — and that instinct is almost always the first thing to throw…
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intermediate
13 min read
RAG and Agents Practice Exercises
You can explain RAG. You can sketch an agent loop. But when a real question lands on your desk, do you know whether to retrieve, route, or just answer?…
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intermediate
10 min read
Build a Simple LLM Agent
Most beginners expect an agent to be a special kind of model—something with built-in magic that can browse the web, run code, and get things done. Then…
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intermediate
9 min read
What Are LLM Agents?
An LLM agent is not a smarter chatbot. It is a goal-driven system that uses a language model as its brain, then loops through action and observation until…
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