- Essays··10 min read
The Cart That Signs Itself
The question in agentic commerce has moved. A language model can assemble a cart, so the live issue is who holds legal authority when that cart signs itself against a live payments rail. The planner-executor split now carries cryptographic mandate obligations with EU regulatory teeth. The missing component in every production deployment studied here is an eval harness rigorous enough to catch the 5–10% of cases that define next quarter's returns rate.
agentic-commerceplanner-executorretail-aipayments-infrastructureRead - 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% 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