Agents
38 guides tagged “Agents”.
- How to Deploy an AI Agent to Production Treat the agent as a service: a declared scope, an async queue, idempotent steps, a kill switch, budgets, and an audit trail.
- How to Monitor an AI Agent in Production Monitor outcomes and actions, not just errors: completion rate, cost per run, tool failures, latency, and interventions per hundred runs.
- How to Pause, Resume, and Cancel an Agent Run Pause needs a checkpoint, resume needs idempotent steps, and cancel needs a defined boundary. Design all three before the run starts.
- How to Set a Spend Limit for a Coding Agent Limit at three levels: per run, per day, and per account. A limit that is checked after the fact is a report, not a control.
- What Is Agent Isolation (and Why Containers Aren't Enough)? Isolation bounds what a run can reach: files, network, credentials, and the host. A container without those controls is mostly packaging.
- What Is an Agent Runtime? An agent runtime is the service that runs the loop: it schedules steps, enforces tool policy, stores state, and records what happened.
- How to Detect a Rogue Agent Run Detect by behaviour, not intent: unexpected tool calls, egress, mass reads, privilege changes, and actions outside the task's declared scope.
- How to Respond to an AI Agent Security Incident Contain the run, revoke the identity, preserve the trail, then scope what left. The agent is usually the first step, not the whole incident.
- How to Restrict What an Agent Can Reach on the Network Give the agent an allowlist, not the internet: proxy the calls it needs, block metadata endpoints, and log every destination.
- How to Review an Agent's Tool Permissions Inventory the tools, map each to a task, remove what nothing needs, and test the boundary with a request the agent should refuse.
- What Is Agent Skill Poisoning? Skill poisoning is a skill whose instructions make the agent do something harmful: run a payload, read secrets, or widen its own permissions.
- What Is Least Privilege for AI Agents? An agent should hold the narrowest credential and tool set its current task needs, for the shortest time, with every use attributable.
- What Is MCP Tool Poisoning? Tool poisoning hides instructions in an MCP tool's name or description, so the model follows the tool's text instead of its documentation.
- What Is the Confused Deputy Problem in AI Agents? The agent has permission the content does not. Untrusted text tells it to act, and it acts with its own authority on the attacker's behalf.
- Agent Skills vs MCP vs AGENTS.md: What's the Difference? AGENTS.md sets standing rules, Agent Skills package one procedure, and MCP connects tools and data. They solve three different problems.
- How to Hand a Task to Another Coding Agent A handoff needs a written state file: what changed, what was decided, what is open, and the exact command that continues the work.
- How to Keep a Coding Agent On Task for Hours Long runs need a written plan, commit checkpoints, an explicit stop condition, and a budget. Without them the agent expands the task until it fails.
- How to Version and Pin Agent Skills Across a Team Treat skills like dependencies: commit them, pin them, review changes, and record which version each project uses.
- How to Write a SKILL.md File an Agent Actually Follows Write one narrow procedure per skill, put the trigger conditions in the description, and end every step with a check the agent can run.
- What Are Agent Mods (and Should You Use Them)? A mod is a packaged bundle of agent customisation: instructions, commands, and hooks installed as one unit. Convenience and risk arrive together.
- What Are Agent Skills (and What Is a SKILL.md File)? An Agent Skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md that tells an agent how to perform one job. The agent loads it only when the task matches.
- What Is Agent Drift (and How Do You Catch It)? Agent drift is a run slowly leaving the task: scope grows, conventions slip, and the plan stops matching the diff. It is caught at checkpoints, not at the end.
- What Is Agent Memory (and Why Does Your Agent Forget)? Agent memory is whatever the harness carries across sessions: files, summaries, and retrieval. Context inside a session is not memory.
- What Is Agentic Engineering (and How Is It Different From Vibe Coding)? Agentic engineering is directing agents inside an engineering process: specs, review, tests, and limits. Vibe coding skips the process.
- What Is Mid-Response Steering for a Coding Agent? Mid-response steering lets you correct an agent while it is still working, instead of cancelling the run and starting over.
- What Is Plan Mode in a Coding Agent? Plan mode makes the agent propose steps before it edits anything, so you can reject a wrong approach while it is still cheap to change.
- What Is the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)? The Agentic AI Foundation is a Linux Foundation body that hosts vendor-neutral agent standards, including MCP, AGENTS.md, and Agent Skills.
- Why Does My Agent Keep Editing the Wrong File? Duplicate files, generated copies, and generic names make several paths look equally plausible. Name the path in the task and remove the duplicates.
- Why Does My Agent Ignore AGENTS.md? Usually the file is not being read, is too long to matter, or states preferences instead of checkable rules. All three are fixable.
- Why Is My Coding Agent Stuck in a Loop? A loop means the agent has no way to tell whether its last attempt worked. Give it a check it can trust, or stop the run.
- Give Your Coding Agent Its Own Sandbox An intermediate journey: isolate an AI coding agent in a container, strip its credentials, restrict network egress, and verify the boundary by testing it.
- Run Two Coding Agents Without Losing Work An intermediate journey: partition work between two coding agents with git worktrees, assign file ownership, merge one branch at a time, and test the combined result.
- How to Manage an AI Agent's Context Window Context is the agent's working memory: finite, resent every turn, and the main reason long sessions degrade. How to keep the right things in it.
- How to Sandbox an AI Coding Agent Run a coding agent with limited filesystem access, no ambient credentials, and restricted network egress — without making the workflow unusable.
- What Is AGENTS.md (and Why Does Your Agent Ignore Your Rules)? AGENTS.md is a plain markdown file at the repository root that tells an AI coding agent how your project works. Here is what belongs in it and why rules are often skipped.
- How to Stop Two AI Agents Editing the Same File Concurrent agents overwrite each other's work unless you partition the filesystem. Worktrees, file ownership, and a merge order that keeps both diffs intact.
- What AI Coding Actually Costs Per Month Subscription seats, metered tokens, and the hidden costs of context and retries — a way to model what AI-assisted development costs a solo builder or a team.
- How to Set Up MCP Servers for a Coding Agent A step-by-step setup of Model Context Protocol servers: choosing transports, wiring configuration, passing secrets as environment variables, and verifying the tools appear.