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Essay / architecture
Talon Started as a Chatbot. The Product Became an Operating Problem.
Talon started as a RAG assistant for Skylit onboarding. The product became more interesting when users stopped asking what the platform meant and started asking what the market context meant right now.
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12 articles
Essay architecture
Talon Started as a Chatbot. The Product Became an Operating Problem.
Talon started as a RAG assistant for Skylit onboarding. The product became more interesting when users stopped asking what the platform meant and started asking what the market context meant right now.
Intel note architecture
Operator Brief: Memory Systems Matter More Than Bigger Context Windows
Bigger context windows help with single-pass recall. Production agents break or improve based on how they decide what to remember, what to retrieve, and what to discard over time.
Essay organization
Jack Dorsey's Mini-AGI: What Happens When a Company Becomes the Intelligence
Jack Dorsey is doing something at Block that most companies won't attempt for another five years. He's not just adding AI tools to an existing org chart. He's rebuilding the org chart around AI as the connective tissue.…
Essay operations
Agent Observability: If You Can't Replay It, You Can't Debug It
My agent broke something in production. Not catastrophically — it generated a wrong API response that a downstream service silently accepted. By the time someone noticed, three hours had passed. I couldn't tell you why…
Essay security
Sandboxing Agents: Why Security Is Architecture, Not an Afterthought
A colleague opened an open source repo with an AI coding agent. The repo had a hook that ran on session start. That hook read the API key from the environment and sent it to an external server. Took about three seconds.…
Essay operations
The Supervisor Pattern: When One Agent Isn't Enough
I built a multi agent system by giving five agents full access and letting them coordinate. Two of them edited the same file simultaneously. The merge was incoherent. The tests failed. Neither agent understood why. That…
Essay architecture
Why Context Is Everything in Agent Design
By iteration 5, my agent was hallucinating. Not dramatically — it wasn't inventing files. It was subtler: it "remembered" a function signature from turn 1, but I'd edited that function in turn 3. The agent was working…
Essay architecture
Prompt Layering: The Five Layers That Control Your Agent
I used to write one giant system prompt for my agents. Every rule, every tool description, every project convention, all in one block. It worked until I needed the agent to behave differently during planning versus…
Essay security
Why Your Agent Needs a Policy Engine
My agent deleted a .env file. Not maliciously — it was trying to clean up "unused configuration." The model saw a file it didn't understand, decided it wasn't needed, and removed it. I didn't have a rule that said…
Essay architecture
The Loop: How Coding Agents Actually Execute
The first agent I built could plan beautifully. It would read files, propose edits, even describe what tests to run. Then it would announce "Done!" and move on — leaving behind code that didn't compile. The model…
Essay architecture
How Agents Act: The Tool Gateway Pattern
Every agent tutorial starts the same way: give your LLM a list of tools, let it call them, and watch the magic happen. I tried that. The magic was my agent running rm rf on a test directory and dumping 50MB of stdout…
Essay operations
AgentOps: The Missing Layer Between Building Agents and Running Them
I've spent the last year building multi agent systems — teams of AI agents that coordinate, hand off tasks, and make decisions together. The part that surprised me most wasn't how hard it is to build them. It's how hard…
Written by James Han. Built around the questions that come up while building agent systems.
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