Alex Gates-Shannon on agentic systems that don't hallucinate their own state.https://alexgs.me/https://alexgs.me/posts/correct-number-of-retries-is-one/https://alexgs.me/posts/correct-number-of-retries-is-one/Building a reliable system around an LLM means dealing with its weird failure modes. The conventional wisdom on retries doesn't fit — a second failure isn't a model problem. It's a signal that the validator, prompt, or schema needs work.Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://alexgs.me/posts/fts-is-the-workhorse/https://alexgs.me/posts/fts-is-the-workhorse/When searching a body of text, the default reflex is to reach for a hybrid search that combines full-text search (FTS) with semantic searches. On a personal corpus, hybrid search consistently underperforms one of its components; FTS is usually but not always the right default.Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://alexgs.me/posts/context-window-is-state/https://alexgs.me/posts/context-window-is-state/When you include the complete message history in the context window, the model will treat it as implicit state, and implicit state drifts. Instead, aggressively prune the message history and provide the model with an authoritative state.Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT