Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Patrick Dougherty: How to Build AI Agents that Actually Work

Feb 22, 2025 · 17:44

Patrick Dougherty, co-founder and CTO of Rosco (acquired by Klarity in 2024), argues that building effective AI agents requires prioritizing reasoning over inherent model knowledge, iterating on the Agent-Computer Interface (ACI) rather than fine-tuning or relying on frameworks. He defines an agent as a system that takes directions, calls tools, and autonomously reasons—not a prompt chain. His team abandoned RAG-style knowledge injection for discrete tool calls (e.g., SEARCH TABLES, GET TABLE DETAIL), finding that GPT-4o often hallucinates impossible SQL queries while o1 correctly identifies missing data. Switching tool-response formats—Markdown to JSON for GPT-4o, JSON to XML for Claude—dramatically improved accuracy. For production, he warns against over-dependence on abstractions like LangGraph due to security needs (e.g., OAuth credential cascading). In multi-agent systems, a manager agent should delegate to 5–8 specialized worker agents, incentivized by the overall goal, to avoid loops. The true moat, he concludes, is the ecosystem—UX, connections, and security—not system prompts.

Open Challenges for AI Engineering: Simon Willison

Jul 17, 2024 · 18:49

Simon Willison argues the GPT-4 barrier has been broken as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and open models like LLaMA 3 70B now compete, making GPT-4-class models a commodity. He highlights the AI trust crisis with examples of Dropbox and Slack being falsely accused of training on user data, and notes Anthropic trained Claude 3.5 Sonnet without customer data. Willison warns about prompt injection vulnerabilities, citing the Markdown image exfiltration bug affecting six major chatbots, and defines slop as unreviewed AI-generated content, calling for accountability and responsible use patterns.