Agentic
MCP Server Design: Build Tool Interfaces That Agents Actually Use Correctly
Model Context Protocol is the new API layer for AI agents. Here's how to design tools that don't confuse them
Brian Gagne
AgenticMagentic Just Hit 1.0, and Your Whole Agent Team Lives or Dies by the Manager's Ledger Prompt
Microsoft Agent Framework's magentic pattern lets a manager invent the workflow at runtime. Here's the ledger prompt that makes it converge instead of loop forever.
Brian Gagne
AgenticYour Agent's 'Done' Is a Lie: Gate Completion on Disk Evidence, Not Its Final Message
Steal the validation-gated completion pattern from July 2026's Paper-replication skill and make every agent attach a receipt before it stops.
Brian Gagne
AgenticYour Agent Reads the Transcript Twice: Stop Piping Tool Outputs Through Context and Filter Them in Code
The 'response bloat' tax quietly doubles your token bill. Here's the prompt pattern that keeps raw tool payloads out of the model's working memory.
Brian Gagne
AgenticYour Agent Should Write Python, Not Emit JSON: Prompting for CodeAct Now That It Ships in Microsoft Agent Framework
BUILD 2026 made code-as-action a first-class pattern. Here's how to rewrite your tool-use prompts from "pick a tool" to "write code that calls the tools" and cut tokens 30-50%.
Brian Gagne
AgenticStop Writing Supervisors, Write Handoffs: The Three-Sentence Prompt That Lets One Agent Surrender Control Without Losing the Thread
Microsoft's new Handoff orchestration pattern proves the routing decision isn't architecture, it's a prompt. Here's how to write it so your agents don't deadlock or drop context.
Brian Gagne
AgenticSpeculative Planning Prompts: How to Make Your Agents Pre-Plan During Tool Call Idle Time
Speculative planning turns dead tool-call wait time into planning cycles that cut agent task completion time
Brian Gagne
AgenticPrompt Architecture for Managed Agent Runtimes: What Changes When You Stop Owning the Orchestration Loop
Anthropic's Managed Agents, Google ADK, and Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 all abstract away the runtime, and your prompts need to catch up
Brian Gagne
AgenticAgentic Code Review: Prompts That Catch Bugs Static Analysis Misses
The code review prompt chain that finds logic errors, not just style violations
Brian Gagne
AgenticFeedback Loop Prompting: Teach Your Agent to Critique and Retry Its Own Output
The inner-loop pattern that turns a single LLM call into an iterative refinement engine
Brian Gagne
AgenticThe Plan-and-Execute Pattern: Use a Frontier Model to Plan, a Cheap Model to Execute
Cut your agentic workflow costs by 90% without losing quality
Brian Gagne