Notes on getting work done by agents
Comparisons, prices as of this month, and what actually works when you hand a task to an AI agent. Written by the people who build and test them.
AI Agent Zero-Downtime Updates: Hot-Swap Configs Without Stopping Runs
Agent updates fail badly when they are in-place. A prompt edit lands mid-run and the second half of a conversation no longer matches the first. A new model lands and a tool-call signature shifts. An index rebuild…
AI Agent ROI Calculator Guide: A Framework for Quantifying Value
ROI calculations for AI agents fall into two categories: defensible numbers backed by measurement, and made-up numbers backed by vendor claims. The CFO can tell the difference. This guide is the defensible version:…
AI Agent Proof of Concept Checklist: 25-Item Pilot Structure
An agent PoC succeeds when the go-no-go decision is obvious within 6 weeks. It fails when scope creeps, baseline is missing, or no one is responsible for the call. The 25-item checklist below covers what to confirm…
AI Agent Platform RFP Template: 60 Questions for Enterprise Procurement
This is the RFP template I send when buyers ask "give me the question list". Sixty questions across six sections, with a 1-to-5 scoring rubric and walk-away criteria. The template assumes enterprise procurement;…
AI Agent Pilot Program Guide: From PoC to Production in 90 Days
A PoC tells you the technology works. A pilot tells you the deployment works. Most teams skip the pilot because the PoC succeeded; then production hits real volume, real users, and real operational concerns, and the…
AI Agent Disaster Recovery Plan: Failover, Backup, RTO and RPO
Most agent platform outages I have seen were not catastrophic. A model provider had an incident; a region's vector store throttled; a deploy clobbered a prompt store; a tenant's run history was deleted by a buggy…
Claude vs ChatGPT Workspace Agents: Tools, Cost, and Where Each Wins
Both Anthropic and OpenAI now ship enterprise chat surfaces that look almost identical in the screenshot: a chat thread, file uploads, custom instructions, connectors, and the ability to schedule or repeat work. The…
ChatGPT Workspace Agents vs Traditional Platforms: When Chat-First Wins
The phrase "AI agent" now covers two products that look similar in a screenshot and behave very differently in production. The first is a chat-first workspace agent: ChatGPT with connectors, files, code interpreter,…
AI Agent SOC 2 Compliance: What Auditors Actually Check
SOC 2 is the buyer-facing artifact most enterprise prospects ask for before they let an AI agent platform near their data. It is also one of the most misunderstood. The report does not certify your AI; it attests…
AI Agent Procurement Checklist: 50 Questions Before You Sign
Most AI agent purchases go wrong at the sales-call stage, not after deployment. The team likes the demo, the vendor likes the deal, and a year later someone is paying for an unused seat tier with a 60-day notice…
AI Agent Multi-Tenant Isolation: Patterns That Pass Audit
The classic SaaS isolation problem is well understood: keep tenant data, queries, and identity separated through the request path. An agent platform adds two new surfaces that have to follow the same rules. The…
AI Agent Log Aggregation Patterns: Schemas, Sampling, Redaction
Agent logs grow fast. A single run easily writes dozens of structured events: orchestrator steps, model calls with input and output bodies, tool calls with payloads, retrieval queries with chunk text. Multiply by…
AI Agent Canary Releases: Percentage Rollout for Prompts and Models
The point of a canary is to learn things evals cannot. Evals run on a held-out set; production runs on whatever showed up today. Some regressions are visible only at production scale, on production traffic shapes,…
AI Agents for Fleet Logistics: Automate Dispatch and Routing
Fuel accounts for roughly 24 percent of total fleet operating costs, according to the American Trucking Associations (ATA, 2024). That's the single largest controllable expense for most carriers. And yet the average…
AI Agents for Construction Firms: Bids, Safety, Tracking
Construction is a $1.36 trillion industry in the United States alone (U.S. Census Bureau, 2025). Yet it remains one of the least digitized sectors on the planet. Projects run over budget 80% of the time. Rework eats…
AI Agent Vendor Evaluation: A Scoring Framework
Picking the wrong AI agent vendor costs more than the subscription fee. Across The Standish Group's CHAOS research, software projects have never had a majority success rate: recent CHAOS data puts roughly 31% of…
AI Agent Success Metrics: 12 KPIs to Track and How to Measure Them
Most teams deploy AI agents and then track nothing. Or they track one metric, usually accuracy, and call it done. That approach misses most of the picture. Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be…
AI Agent Secret Management: Store Keys and Tokens Safely
An AI agent that calls five APIs holds five sets of credentials that an attacker can steal. That's not a hypothetical risk. The 2024 IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report found that stolen or compromised credentials…
AI Agent Performance Tuning: Cut Latency and Token Waste
Your AI agent works. It answers questions, calls tools, returns useful output. But it takes eight seconds to respond, and your token bill keeps climbing. Sound familiar? Performance tuning is the difference between…
AI Agent Cost Attribution: Track Spend by Agent, Task, and Team
Your company runs 15 agents across four departments. The LLM bill arrives as a single line item. Finance asks: "Who spent what?" You don't have an answer. That gap between aggregate spend and per-team accountability…
The AI Agent Security Checklist for 2026: 47 Controls Every Team Should Verify
Prompt injection is the #1 risk on the OWASP LLM Top 10 (OWASP, 2025). Agents amplify every LLM risk by adding tools, persistence, and autonomy. This checklist gives you 47 controls across 10 categories. Each control…
AI Agent Handoff Patterns: 8 Contracts That Don't Drop Work
A handoff is the contract between two agents (or one agent and a human) that specifies what gets passed, when, and what happens if the receiver is unavailable. Eight patterns cover most production cases. LangGraph,…
AI Agent Fallback and Retry: A 2026 Playbook for Idempotency, Backoff, and Model Cascades
Naive retries amplify outages; smart retries absorb them. The Google SRE book defines a retry budget so retries can't exceed a fixed fraction of normal load (Google SRE, ch. 22). For AI agents the same logic applies…
Where to Publish AI Agents in 2026: Builder's Guide
You can build an AI agent in a weekend. Finding people who will pay to run it is the hard part. Most builders default to GitHub, get a few stars, and call it shipped. Three months later, the repo is collecting dust…
What Makes a Top AI Agent on Gravity (2026)
Builders ask the same question on day one: "How do I get my agent to the top of Gravity?" The honest answer is that we do not sell that spot. Not to the loudest builder, not to the highest bidder, not to ourselves.…
How to Validate an AI Agent Idea Before You Build
Most builders skip validation. They pick an agent idea on Saturday, build for 40 hours over two weekends, publish to a marketplace, and watch it sit at zero runs. According to CB Insights' 2024 post-mortem analysis…
From n8n Hobbyist to AI Agent Income: 2026 Guide
n8n's community crossed 200,000 builders in 2024 according to n8n's own docs and community stats, and the GitHub star count sits north of 60,000. That's a small city of people who know how to chain APIs together. Yet…
How to Monetize AI Agents in 2026: Builder Guide
If you can build an AI agent in n8n, LangChain, make.com, or any of the other workflow tools that have eaten the last three years, you can earn from it. The path from a working workflow to actual recurring revenue is…
First 5 AI Agents to Build for Recurring Income (2026)
Most first-time AI agent builders pick the wrong agent. They chase a clever idea instead of a boring, repeatable workflow that someone already pays a human to do. The five agents below all hit the same pattern: clear…
AI Agents for Veterinarians: 9 Use Cases That Replace a Missing Front-Desk Hire (2026)
Veterinary practices are losing front-desk staff faster than they can hire. The Merck Animal Health Veterinary Wellbeing Study and AVMA workforce reports both frame the shortage as structural rather than cyclical…