- Essays··10 min read
The Cart That Signs Itself
The question in agentic commerce has moved: not whether a language model can assemble a cart — it can — but 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 — 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