agents

My kids school was rated Requires Improvement and facing re-inspection. The evidence base was 1,650 files and 918 megabytes. No governor was going to read all of it. So we built a tool that could.

Stop hoping that relevant information will fit in the context window. Start manufacturing a task-specific context file before the task begins. The mechanism, the receipts, and the benchmark that gates it shipping.

Long-running tasks fail silently if the session dies before the result is ready. This is the runner I built to make "email me when done" actually mean that. Retry loop, fallback email paths, and a last-ditch file.

Why the regression models that came out of the hackathon got replaced within weeks by three agentic tools. The short version: probability scores without narrative are not what analysts need.

A vague ask ("give me a list of prospects that look like X") turned into a working pipeline across three data sources in under sixty minutes. A small build, but the speed is the point.

Running Claude, Gemini and GPT-5.4 on the same question in parallel, blind Round 0, informed from Round 1 onward. What works, what does not, and the confidence trap I did not predict.