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14 min read
A2A Explained: How Agent-to-Agent Communication Differs from MCP
MCP answers "what can I call?" A2A answers "who can I hand this to?" Different questions, different failure modes.
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Secure Agent Execution
Security boundaries for agent capabilities and execution, including isolation, authorization, permissions, approvals, and independent checks.
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Secure Agent Execution articles
19 articles in this tag.
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17 min read
Agent Execution Environments: Filesystems, Shells, Browsers, Code, Databases, and Sandboxes
The demo worked because the agent was running on your laptop. It had your credentials, your network, your home directory, and your shell history. Move it…
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9 min read
The Agent Harness as an Operating System: Capabilities, State, Execution, and Lifecycle
The demo agent works. It reads the file, runs the test, patches the bug. Then it ships to a second tenant, the session runs for six hours, the process dies…
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17 min read
Agent Skills and Procedural Capabilities: Prompts, Scripts, Assets, and Progressive Disclosure
Every agent builder hits the same wall. The first working agent is small: a system prompt, a few tools, a loop. Then someone needs release notes. Someone…
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17 min read
Chroma Context-1: What Is a Self-Editing Search Agent?
Hop three. The context window is full. Half of it is plausible garbage — passages that matched the query, ranked well, and turned out to be useless. The…
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11 min read
Codex Security Explained: Can an AI Agent Find, Validate, and Patch Vulnerabilities?
A scanner that flags ten thousand findings and a researcher who proves three are both "finding vulnerabilities." Only one of them has evidence you can…
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17 min read
Coding Agent Harnesses: Workspaces, Shells, Artifacts, Tests, and Long-Horizon State
The agent writes the function, re-reads it, decides it looks correct, and stops. The code is wrong. This is the most common failure in autonomous coding,…
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13 min read
Designing a Workspace Operations Agent: Tools, State, Persistence, and Human Approval
The demo works. The agent reads the queue, drafts the update, and posts it. Then someone asks who approved the change, which run produced it, and how to…
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11 min read
Is MCP Dead? Why CLI + Skills Are Challenging Tool-Server Architectures
The agent worked yesterday. Today it burns forty thousand tokens before it reads your first instruction, and the hook that used to register identity with a…
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14 min read
MCP for Agent Capabilities: Resources, Tools, Prompts, Discovery, and Runtime Context
A team wires up an MCP server, watches the tools appear in the client, and concludes the integration works. Then a tool gets renamed upstream, a resource…
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11 min read
OpenAI’s Evolving Agents SDK: Why Agent Workspaces, Sandboxes, and Durable State Matter
An agent that only works until the container restarts is not an agent. It is a demo with a heartbeat.
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9 min read
OpenClaw vs Hermes Agent: Two Open-Source Visions for Personal AI Agents
Two projects both advertise "open source, model-agnostic, multi-channel, MCP support." A builder picks one, ships it, and discovers the real difference the…
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9 min read
Pi and the Minimal Agent Harness: Can Four Tools Be Enough?
Your agent has thirty tools, four MCP servers, and a plan-mode toggle. It still fumbles a routine refactor, and when it does, you cannot tell whether the…
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15 min read
Role Isolation, Approvals, and Independent Validation in Agent Runtimes
That is the shape of the failure I keep seeing in agent systems that look governed and are not. A team writes a planner prompt, a coder prompt, a reviewer…
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15 min read
Self-Harness: Can AI Agents Improve Their Own Harnesses?
The loop that improves the harness can also edit the evaluator, the permissions, and the rollback path. That is the whole problem in one sentence.
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13 min read
Thin vs Thick Agent Harnesses: How Much Scaffolding Does a Model Need?
Two teams run the same model on the same task. One ships reliably. The other drowns in tool-call latency, context bloat, and incidents nobody can explain…
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16 min read
Tool Engineering for AI Agents: Schemas, Descriptions, Contracts, Errors, and Idempotency
A failed agent run rarely looks like an interface problem. It looks like a model problem: wrong tool, malformed arguments, an error swallowed and retried…
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10 min read
What Is an Agent Harness? The Software Layer Around an LLM
Two teams ship the same model, the same prompt, the same tool list. One agent finishes a multi-step task. The other stalls, loops, and quietly corrupts its…
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12 min read
Workflow vs Agent: Deterministic Control and Model-Directed Decisions
The demo worked. Production didn't. Somewhere between the two, the system took a path nobody wrote down, and when it failed there was no artifact…
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