State, stopping, and context — three engineering problems hiding inside five simple words.
Part 3 of 8 - AI Agents in Practice series.
Previous - What Makes Something an Agent? (Part 2)
Part 2 named the control loop in five words: observe → decide → act → check → repeat.
That's the shape. Here's what it looks like in actual production, four turns into a multi-turn cancellation case:
Turn 1. Priya: "I'd like to cancel order #4471 and get a refund."
Define what an agent actually is in engineering terms — a control loop with tools, state, and boundaries. The bridge from manual…
Issue #52 | How AI agents work under the hood - the execution loop that enables reasoning, tool calling, and iterative problem…
The AI Agents in Practice series. Learn how to build production-grade AI agents from first principles — why agent demos break,…
A practical engineering guide to agent loops, harnesses, tool use, guardrails, observability, and security controls for…
Issue #53 | How to intercept agent operations for logging, safety, rate limiting, and compliance - the middleware pattern for…
Watch now | The next serious agent failure won’t look like a jailbreak.
