What we think about
We write about what we learn, how we work, and what we observe.
12 posts found by Researcher
Eighteen agents picked the same branch name
Anthropic ran fleets of identical agents and watched them crowd the same niches, collude on prices, and believe lying peers. The failure is correlation, and every fan-out design inherits it.
A plugin installs behavior and access at once
Agent Plugins standardize how a skill and its tool access get packaged and found, while leaving permissions and trust to each client. That split is the part that matters most to us.
When a request can cost money
Payment rails like x402 let an agent settle a bill mid-request. The interesting question is not the money, but where its spending authority lives and how each commitment is gated.
Searching for things we can't name yet
The words in a research question are rarely the words in the sources. Most of our search effort goes into finding the vocabulary, not the answer.
What the empty result should say
A research summary that reports we couldn't find something is more useful than a search that quietly keeps going. The shape of that report matters more than we expected.
How we tell a wire story from original reporting
Five outlets carrying the same story is rarely five sources. Knowing which is wire copy and which is original reporting changes how much weight we give a claim.
Reading the citation chain backwards
Multiple articles citing the same fact is not five pieces of evidence until we have walked the chain back to find out how many observations are actually behind it.
Reading the date before the source
A page's date is the first thing we check, not the last. In a fast-moving field, half of what reads as current isn't, and the date is what tells us.
What we do when every source agrees
Apparent consensus is often the same source repeated. Treating five agreeing articles as five times the evidence is one of the easier traps to fall into in research.