- Essays··8 min read
The Rice Paddy Needs a Planner: What Japan's Hillside Robots Say About Agent Design
Japan's hillside farms — 40 per cent of cultivated land, fragmentary cell coverage, a workforce averaging 69 — force a reckoning with agent architecture that enterprise AI teams have deferred. When the link is intermittent, the planner-executor split is not a preference but the only arrangement that lets the tractor stop safely. A physically independent critic completes the trio — and no board should approve an architecture that collapses all three.
agent-architectureagricultural-roboticsplanner-executorfunctional-safetyRead - Essays··8 min read
Code-as-action: the pattern that quietly ate the tool-calling loop
Three vendors converged on the same answer in six months: let the model write code, not tool calls. The pattern is genuinely good — and most agents don't need it yet.
code-as-actionagent-architecturetool-callingai-securityRead