A Timeout Was Never Evidence of Failure — Designing Around Blocking Function Calls
When a tool call cannot return until the real-world effect finishes, two habits reverse on you: parallel dispatch and generous timeouts. Measured numbers from a sandbox harness, plus the design that replaces retries with observation.
Measuring Update Policies for Memory Profiles: The Guard That Cost Me 16 Points of Accuracy
Memory profiles went GA in Memory Bank, making structured memory available to downstream code. I built three update policies and compared them under identical conditions. The one that looked obviously correct turned out to be the worst. Full harness code and the path to per-field TTLs.
Measuring a Guard in environment hooks: 46 Microseconds to Decide, 23 Milliseconds to Start
A record of building a destructive-command guard for Managed Agents environment hooks. A regex denylist let 9 of 20 dangerous commands through; argv parsing reached 100 percent detection. The startup cost turned out to be 500 times the decision cost.