Blog
Notes on building agentic AI
Fifteen short reads, drawn from our internal Agentic AI Masterclass: vocabulary, architecture, governance, and two real production case studies.
Build It Yourself or Rent It? Self-Hosted Runtimes vs. Managed Agent Platforms
You still own the agent's logic — the platform owns the operational burden around it. The honest question isn't which is better, but how much of your engineering time should go into infrastructure versus behavior.
What Is a "Harness"? The Hidden Layer Behind Every Agent
Every agent runs inside something that interprets its instructions and executes the resulting steps. A great deal of what looks like a difference in "how smart" a system is turns out to be a difference in harness design.
Deterministic vs. Non-Deterministic: When Should an Agent Decide for Itself?
For any given step, should the model decide which tool to call and when, or should that decision be pre-scripted? A well-built agentic system typically contains plenty of both.
Three Ways an Agent Reaches Beyond Itself: Tools, MCP, and A2A
A language model, on its own, only produces text. There are three distinct mechanisms for extending it beyond that — and choosing the wrong one for a given job creates real complexity later.