Agents on René Zander | AI Automation Consultant

Agentic Knowledge Base — Karpathy's LLM wiki, with adapters

Sat, 02 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

When Karpathy’s LLM Wiki post landed, I already had semantic search over my TickTick — qdrant for the vector store, nomic-embed-text via ollama for embeddings, a daily cron to keep the index fresh, the works. The agent-side retrieval wasn’t the missing piece.

What was missing was the structure. Karpathy’s framing — designate a wiki, write notes for an LLM reader, lean on retrieval instead of taxonomy — surfaced the parts of my setup that didn’t have shape yet: where durable knowledge lives versus ephemeral tasks, how agents pull structured data out of notes humans wrote, why my existing semantic search sometimes returned the right answer and sometimes returned nothing useful.

What Anthropic's April 23 Postmortem Reveals About Your Agent Harness

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The April 23 Claude Code postmortem dropped last week. Three bugs, two months of degraded output, one usage-limit reset for every Pro subscriber.

I read it twice. The second time I started writing notes for my own agent harness.

It is unusually candid for a company at this scale, and it reads like a checklist of failure modes any team running production AI agents will eventually hit. Worth treating as a free engineering review.

Claude Code SDK Agents: Build Production Agents Without the Loop

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0200

Most “build an agent with Claude” tutorials hand you a while-loop around client.messages.create, a hand-rolled tool dispatcher, and a promise that you’ll wire up file reads and shell execution yourself. That works. It also means you spend two weeks rebuilding the same plumbing that Claude Code already ships with.

The Claude Code SDK, sometimes called the Claude Agent SDK, is the shortcut. Same runtime as the claude CLI, exposed as a library in TypeScript and Python, plus a print mode you can call from a bash cron job. You get file tools, bash, MCP client, subagents, hooks, and permission modes without writing any of it.

Claude Extended Thinking: budget_tokens & Output Token Costs

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0100

The first time I turned on Claude extended thinking for a real agent, the run went from 4 seconds to 47. The output was better. The bill was worse. That tradeoff is the whole story.

Claude extended thinking lets Opus or Sonnet produce a block of visible reasoning tokens before the final answer. You give it a budget, it spends that budget thinking, and you pay for every thinking token at the output rate. The upside is measurable quality gains on multi-step problems. The downside is latency and cost that scale with the budget you set.

AI Skills Are the New Boilerplate: They Fix Nothing

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 11:13:17 +0000

Everyone’s sharing their skill libraries right now. “Here are my 20 custom slash commands.” “Check out my prompt template collection.” “This skill saves me 2 hours a day.”

I use skills too. I have about a dozen. They handle cover letters, content pipelines, code review, commit messages. Repeatable workflows where the input and output are predictable.

They cover maybe 10% of what my AI system actually does.

The other 90% is the part nobody shares on social media because it’s ugly. It’s API integrations that break when headers change. It’s state management between sessions. It’s error handling for when the third-party service returns garbage. It’s monitoring that pages you at 6 AM because a cron failed. It’s human-in-the-loop workflows where the AI proposes and you approve before anything touches production.