- Essays··8 min read
The Rice Paddy Needs a Planner: What Japan's Hillside Robots Say About Agent Design
Japan's hillside farms cover 40 per cent of cultivated land, with fragmentary cell coverage and a workforce averaging 69. They force a reckoning with agent architecture that enterprise AI teams have deferred. When the link is intermittent, the planner-executor split is 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 instead of tool calls. The pattern is genuinely good. Most agents don't need it yet.
code-as-actionagent-architecturetool-callingai-securityRead