Agents

This is the retrospective for the multi-agent document analysis project. The first posts covered: why use multiple agents how the specialist agents work how the coordinator synthesizes findings This one covers what worked, what broke, and what I would change. In short, the architecture worked, the coordinator was the most valuable part, and chunking caused the worst failure mode. What worked The BaseAgent abstraction was enough. I did not need a framework. A simple base class handled the repeated LLM-call logic: model name, system prompt, max tokens, response cleaning, and JSON parsing. ...

After building the specialist agents, the output looked impressive. It was not useful enough. The system produced: 12 technical findings 14 risk findings 10 cost findings timeline findings That is a lot of analysis. It is also a lot to read. The coordinator is the piece that turns those separate findings into something a person can act on. Aggregation is not synthesis The first version of the coordinator just ran the agents and returned their results. ...

The first post covered why I split document analysis into multiple agents. This one covers how the specialists are actually built. The Python code is not the hard part. The specialist behavior mostly comes from: the system prompt the output schema the boundaries around what the agent should ignore The code is intentionally repetitive. Once you’ve written a couple agents, it’s a breeze. The shared base class Every agent needs the same basic execution logic: ...

I built a document analysis system for RFPs and contracts using multiple specialist LLM agents instead of one general-purpose prompt. The architecture is simple: PDF → text extraction → Technical Analyzer → Risk Analyzer → Cost Analyzer → Timeline Analyzer → Coordinator synthesis → final report The interesting part is not that it calls an LLM. That’s easy. The interesting part is how much the output changes when the model is forced to analyze the same document through different lenses before producing a final answer. ...

I wanted to understand what it actually takes to build something that makes real decisions. So I built a job research agent using LangGraph: give it a company name, it autonomously gathers information from multiple sources, evaluates whether it has enough to work with, and loops back if it doesn’t. This post is about what that process taught me about state, nodes, and conditional nodes. The Problem With Linear Pipelines A typical “agent” pattern looks like this: ...

I built a college football data MCP server that connects Claude to CollegeFootballData.com, a free API with deep historical stats, advanced metrics, recruiting data, and play-by-play going back decades. Its data goes beyond what frontier AI models are trained on. Getting it working was straightforward — there’s a gofastmcp.com tutorial for that. Getting Claude to use it well required understanding something that’s easy to overlook: the key interface between an LLM and a tool is the docstring. ...