Background Agents and Parallel Execution: Run Eight Tasks at Once Without Conflicts
The orchestration patterns behind Cursor's parallel agents and Claude Code's background tasks
Pillar
Agentic
Multi-step chains, tool use, orchestration, feedback loops
28 articles • Page 1 of 4
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
Your Agent Skips Step 3 Every Time: Stop Describing Your Procedure and Verify Its Trace Instead
Turn your workflow's "always do X before Y" rules into machine-checkable invariants that catch out-of-order tool calls before they cause damage.
Magentic 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.
Your Agent's 'Done' Is a Lie: Gate Completion on Disk Evidence, Not Its Final Message
Steal the validation-gated completion pattern from this week's Paper-replication skill and make every agent attach a receipt before it stops.
Your Agent's Planner Is Fine. Its Aggregator Is What's Broken
ROMA hit state-of-the-art on SealQA by compressing every subtask tree before it bubbles up. Here are the four node prompts you can copy without adopting the framework.
Your 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.
Stop Prompting Your Agent. Engineer the Loop That Prompts It
The four standing prompts behind Boris Cherny's "loop engineering" -- find-work, do-work, verify, remember -- with copy-paste scaffolds and the guardrails that keep them from running rogue.
Your 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%.