Agentic
The Conductor Prompt: Ten Specialist Roles, Five Workers in Flight
A catalog, a task packet, and a fail-closed ledger, not a project-manager persona
Brian Gagne
AgenticBackground 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
Brian Gagne
AgenticMCP 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
AgenticYour 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.
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'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.
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
AgenticStop Prompting Your Agent. Engineer the Loop That Prompts It
The four standing prompts behind "loop engineering" (find work, do work, verify, remember), with copy-paste scaffolds and the guardrails that keep them from running rogue.
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