News & guides
Building an MCP Server: A Working One in an Afternoon
A practical walkthrough of writing your first MCP server: choosing the tools, wiring the transport, handling errors, and testing it with a real agent.
· 9 min read
Context Compaction: Keeping Agents Alive Past Turn Twenty
Agent transcripts grow until quality degrades and cost climbs. What to summarise, what to drop, and what must never be compacted away.
· 9 min read
Critic Agent Patterns: Useful Review Without Endless Rewrites
A critic agent reviews work another agent produced. The patterns that improve output, the ones that just add cost, and how to tell them apart.
· 9 min read
Debugging a Stuck Agent: A Triage Runbook
Stuck is four different failures with four different fixes. How to tell hung from looping from stalled from quietly truncated, and what to do about each one.
· 9 min read
Dependency-Aware Planning: Ordering Work That Blocks
Most agent plans are flat lists executed top to bottom. Modelling dependencies instead unlocks parallelism, better retries and honest progress reporting.
· 9 min readDetecting Agent Loops Before They Burn Your Budget
A stuck agent repeats the same failing action until something stops it. How to detect repetition cheaply and what to do once you have.
· 8 min readIdempotency in Agent Actions: Safe to Repeat by Design
Agents retry, resume and duplicate calls constantly. Idempotency keys, natural keys and check-then-act patterns that stop one action happening three times.
· 9 min readMap-Reduce With Agents: Splitting Work That Actually Splits
Map-reduce over an LLM is not the same as map-reduce over data. Where the shape works, where the reduce step quietly loses information, and how to fix it.
· 9 min read
MCP Server Design: Fewer Tools, Sharper Boundaries
Most MCP servers are a thin wrapper around an existing API, which is why agents use them badly. Design rules for servers models can actually operate.
· 9 min readMCP Transport Options: stdio, HTTP and When Each Fits
MCP runs the same JSON-RPC messages over a local subprocess or an HTTP endpoint. The transport you pick decides your auth, scaling and debugging story.
· 8 min readMCP vs Plain Tool Calling: When the Protocol Earns Its Keep
MCP and a plain function schema look identical to the model. The difference is who owns the integration, and that decides which one you should use.
· 8 min readMeasuring Agent Success Rate Without Fooling Yourself
Success rate is the easiest agent metric to report and the easiest to game. Here is how to define it so the number predicts production behaviour.
· 9 min readReady to try it?
Every model behind one key. Start free and upgrade when it sticks.