A 3-Part Series: Agents, Workflows, and Skills – Build the Right Thing In Part 1, we built a bug investigation agent. In Part 2, we built a content quality pipeline. Both worked. Both had AI doing something I hope you find genuinely useful. But if you read them back to back with a sufficiently critical eye – the kind of eye a good code reviewer develops after seeing the same mistake for the fifth time – you’d notice something I deliberately left in both systems: capability reuse. The bug agent could search code. The content pipeline had its own policy checker.…
Category: <span>Java</span>
A 3-Part Series: Agents, Workflows, and Skills – Build the Right Thing There’s a phrase I’ve used in engineering reviews for years, usually right before someone’s six-week project gets redirected: “Don’t hire a strategist when you need a soldier.” In Part 1, we discuss agents – an autonomous AI system that reasons its way through open-ended problem. If you read it, you know I’m a fan. They’re genuinely capable, and when you deploy one in the right context, it feels like a superpower. But here’s the thing nobody says out loud at AI conferences: most of what you actually need to build…
A 3-Part Series: Agents, Workflows, and Skills – Build the Right Thing Every few years, “intelligent automation” gets a fresh coat of paint – and a fresh wave of hype – while leaving behind a familiar trail of abandoned projects. Expert systems. Neural nets. Rule engines. Ontologies (remember those? Well… it’s coming back. That’ll be a separate blog). Even microservices got swept into the narrative at one point. And now: agents. Here’s the take: this wave is meaningfully different. But the failure mode hasn’t changed. Engineers still tend to grab the shiny new hammer before fully understanding the nail –…
In my original Tetris code base, I started out with a simple RotationController class. As I recall, this was a trivial class with a single shape. However, as more shapes were added, it quickly became unwieldy. Looking back at this code, I want to cringe at my lack of discipline in following proper design principles. On the bright side, I have something to blog about. Chain of Responsibility The chain of responsibility design pattern is known as a behavioral pattern consisting of client objects and a series of handler objects. It provides more than one object the opportunity to handle a request by…
I’ve been planning to write some tutorials on design patterns. I just need to find some time and my day job at the corporate world has kept me busy. I plan to use this code base from a java tetris application I wrote a while back. I’ve done some clean ups – who’s not embarrassed by their old code. Don’t worry, I haven’t completely cleaned it up. After all, the plan is to write tutorials on design patterns that would help improve this code. My first topic, when I do get some time, will be Chain of Responsibility.