Agent Reliability on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming http://programmer.ie/tags/agent-reliability/ Recent content in Agent Reliability on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming Hugo en-us Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Advanced Agents From First Principles 26: Why Did the Agent Fail? Build an Incident Forensics Pipeline http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-26/ Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-26/ A practical incident-forensics workflow for advanced agents: reconstruct the run, find the earliest divergence, distinguish root cause from downstream symptoms, measure blast radius, and prove that a remediation would have prevented the incident. Advanced Agents From First Principles 27: How Reliable Does an Agent Need to Be? Define SLOs and Error Budgets http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-27/ Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-27/ A practical reliability framework for advanced agents: define verified-success SLOs, false-success ceilings, UNKNOWN budgets, latency and cost targets, then use error-budget burn to decide when to ship capability and when to stop and harden the system. Advanced Agents From First Principles 28: Where Should You Spend the Next Engineering Hour? Prioritize Reliability by Risk and Expected Return http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-28/ Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-28/ A practical framework for deciding where to spend the next engineering hour in an advanced-agent system: rank remediation by expected reduction in verified reliability loss, severity, recurrence, blast radius, confidence and implementation cost. Advanced Agents From First Principles 29: When Should an Agent Stop and Ask a Human? Design Authority Boundaries and Escalation http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-29/ Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-29/ A practical architecture for agent authority boundaries: decide what an agent may do autonomously, when it must escalate, what evidence a human reviewer needs, and how to avoid turning human approval into rubber-stamping. Advanced Agents From First Principles 30: Is This Task Outside Your Agent’s Competence? Build Competence Envelopes and OOD Detection http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-30/ Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-30/ A practical framework for competence envelopes in production agents: distinguish uncertainty from lack of validated competence, detect out-of-distribution tasks, contract authority when evidence is weak, and expand autonomy only through measured evidence. Advanced Agents From First Principles 31: How Can an Agent Learn New Capabilities Without Expanding Its Own Authority? Use Sandboxed Capability Acquisition http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-31/ Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-31/ A practical architecture for sandboxed capability acquisition: let agents explore tasks outside their validated competence envelope, accumulate externally verified evidence, and propose capability expansion without ever granting themselves production authority. Advanced Agents From First Principles 35: How Do You Move a Running Agent Between Workers Without Losing Meaning? Build Portable Execution State and Safe Handoff http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-35/ Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-35/ A practical architecture for portable agent execution state: checkpoint long-running runs, transfer ownership safely across workers and providers, preserve evidence and authority, and reject migrations that cannot be proven compatible. Advanced Agents From First Principles 36: Is Your Agent Acting on Stale State? Build Temporal Consistency, Freshness Budgets and Conflict Detection http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-36/ Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-36/ A practical architecture for keeping long-running agents from acting on stale assumptions: classify state by freshness, track version vectors, detect conflicts, revalidate before consequential actions, and force replanning when the world has changed underneath the run. Advanced Agents From First Principles 37: Is Your Agent Still Solving the Right Task? Build Intent Versioning, Supersession and Cancellation http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-37/ Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-37/ A production architecture for intent versioning, supersession and cancellation in long-running agents: stop obsolete work, preserve committed effects, reconcile partial actions, and prevent stale goals from retaining authority. Advanced Agents From First Principles 39: How Do You Make an Agent Survive for Days? Build Durable Long-Running Workflows http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-39/ Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-39/ A practical architecture for long-running agents: keep workflow state durable while treating models and workers as disposable, with explicit waits, retries, timers, human approvals, checkpoints, commitments, cancellation and replay. Advanced Agents From First Principles 42: How Do Multiple Agents Coordinate Without Becoming a Distributed Argument? http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-42/ Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-42/ A practical architecture for multi-agent coordination: explicit ownership, delegation, contracts, commitment transfer, shared intent, evidence provenance, conflict handling, deadlock prevention, and independent verification instead of agents merely chatting until they agree. Advanced Agents From First Principles 43: Who Controls the Agent? Build an Explicit Agent Control Plane http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-43/ Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-43/ A production-agent architecture that separates control-plane policy from execution-plane reasoning: intent, competence, authority, placement, budgets, reliability, releases, security and escalation remain enforceable outside the model.