Every post comes from something I've done on a real project. AI tools, development approaches, how I actually build things. You're getting a curation of my taste, not takes on stuff I don't use. Subscribers also get extras: things that went wrong, how my thinking about AI is changing, hacky workflows I use every day, and the occasional personal update. Stuff I share with subscribers because it's a little too personal or unpolished to blast across the internet.
tool architecture free talk
|
Hey this is Isaac, Hamel Husain and I are doing a free public talk on tool architecture anti-patterns for agents: MCP, skills, CLIs, plugins, and custom tools. Some of the most popular and widely used skills, CLIs, and mcp’s fall into one of these anti-patterns. Is MCP good? Are skills enough? Should this be a CLI? That is the wrong starting point. A tool call is a product surface and should be created with the same care given to any other user facing page. When it’s treated like plumbing to tack-on existing capabilities in a new place, you get these anti-patterns. In the talk, I will walk through the five biggest anti-patterns and the fixes. It is free. Join here: https://maven.com/p/d665de/mcp-cli-agent-skill-or-custom-tool Hope to see you there, Isaac |
Isaac Flath
Every post comes from something I've done on a real project. AI tools, development approaches, how I actually build things. You're getting a curation of my taste, not takes on stuff I don't use. Subscribers also get extras: things that went wrong, how my thinking about AI is changing, hacky workflows I use every day, and the occasional personal update. Stuff I share with subscribers because it's a little too personal or unpolished to blast across the internet.
I’ve been working on extracting data from documents, and I've shared a bunch to of stuff on the topic Hosted talks on OCR and VLMs to get tables, text, images, etc. out of documents Mini examples of which models and pipelines work in specific cases Retrieval on PDF documents to grab specific source data Antaripa Saha worked on #3 as part of her work in the AI Product Engineering Club. She compared keyword search, dense OCR, visual embeddings, multivectors, and reranking on complex financial...
Hey, I often see people struggling because users have different preferences and it's had to get what exactly they want out of them. This leads the agent (and your product) to give an answer that isn't what the user wants. I gave a talk and did a writeup on query disambiguation in the community. It covers patterns from AnkiHub, AI2 Paper Finder, NotebookLM, Deep Research, Censys, Lovable, Spiral, and Codex. Read or watch the post on the web. Isaac Query Disambiguation Read or Watch the talk on...
Hey, How to get data out of documents is the most common thing I get asked about privately, because if the source data extraction is wrong everything in the product will be wrong downstream. There's so many edge cases related to the reading order, tables, images, images with text inside them, scans, handwriting that is a picture embedded in a scanned document, etc. I hosted Joe Barrow for a deep dive on VLMs (vision language models) for OCR. He has processed hundreds of millions of document...