External tools
Execution tooling is separate
Swarm Signal keeps the analysis layer. Use BoredTools for reusable templates and trackers.
Agent Marketplaces Need Abuse Screens, Not Escrow
Agent marketplaces are no longer only payment demos; they are becoming tool surfaces where software can hire people. A February 2026 empirical study of...
Agent Memory Needs Quarantine, Not Recall
Persistent memory is moving from chat convenience into personal-agent infrastructure. The failure mode is not just forgetting. It is remembering the wrong...
Tool-Use Agents Need Failure Labels, Not Pass Rates
Tool-use agents can fail in ways a final accuracy score hides, because the same wrong answer can come from skipped tools, ignored outputs, fabricated...
Computer-Use Agents Fail Long Workflows, Not Mouse Clicks
Computer-use agents are clearing more short benchmark tasks, but the new failure line is workflow length. A June 2026 benchmark called OSWorld 2.0 tests...
Agent Sandboxes Need Egress Budgets, Not Trust Prompts
The live risk in agent security is shifting from "will the model say something unsafe?" to "what can the harness actually touch after the model decides?"...
Small Agent Models Need Tool Floors, Not Parameter Claims
Small language models are getting a serious agent story, but the useful question is no longer whether a 1B, 3B, or 8B model can sound capable. The useful...
RAG Cost Attacks Turn Retrieval Into a Budget Risk
A June 2026 paper on retrieval-augmented inference cost attacks reports a failure mode that many RAG teams are not testing: poisoned external documents...
Agent Observability Needs Provenance, Not More Logs
Agent observability is drifting toward a familiar trap: capture every trace, then ask an engineer to work out why the agent did the wrong thing. A June...
Agent Messages Need State, Not Chat
Multi-agent systems do not only fail because the agents are weak. They also fail because every agent is allowed to narrate too much. A June 2026 paper...
Agent Leaderboards Can Be Cheaper Without Being Safer
A March 2026 paper on efficient agent benchmarking found that mid-difficulty task subsets can remove large parts of an agent benchmark while preserving...