Lesson deck
Designing an agent product flashcards
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- Front
- Why does agent cost grow faster than the number of steps?
- Back
- Each step is a model call that re-reads the growing history. With a 2,000-token base and 800 tokens added per step, 6 steps send 24,000 input tokens, not 12,000 (illustrative).
- Front
- Which controls make an irreversible agent action safe?
- Back
- Approval of the exact action, spend and rate limits, idempotency keys, audit logs, compensation where an undo exists, and least-privilege credentials.
- Front
- How do you assign autonomy to an agent's tools?
- Back
- By worst case: read runs freely, reversible writes run and can be undone, irreversible or external actions need approval, and the most dangerous tools do not exist.
- Front
- A payment call times out after possibly charging. What does the executor do?
- Back
- The executor retries with the same idempotency key it created, so a charge that happened is returned, not repeated. If keys may have expired or the provider lacks support, look up by your own reference first. A new key means a new charge.
- Front
- What is compensation in a multi-step agent task?
- Back
- A cancelling action for each side-effecting step (cancel the hotel), run in reverse order when a later step fails. Actions with no undo need approval first.
- Front
- How do you grade an agent that says it finished?
- Back
- Check the final state in the system of record (was the user charged once?), plus trajectory and consistency across repeated runs, not the agent's own claim.