• A dedicated failure hook beats generic logging: it stamps failures with a high pain score so retrieval surfaces them later, and counts failures per skill, flagging any skill for rewrite after three failures in fourteen days.
• A nightly cron job at 3am compresses memory, promotes repeated lessons into durable ones, archives stale entries, and commits the result to git. The commit history becomes a readable record of what the agent learned each night.
• Keep the root config file under thirty lines. It is a map telling the agent where memory, skills and protocols live and what to read first — not an encyclopedia competing for the same context budget as actual work.
• A decisions file should log only choices that would be expensive to re-debate, each with rationale, alternatives considered, and whether it is still active. Without it, you and the agent relitigate settled architecture every few months.

• AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
• agent hook — A script the harness runs automatically at a fixed point in an agent's loop — before a tool call, after an edit, on session start.
• agent skill — A reusable instruction file that teaches an agent how to do one job well — the procedure, the tools, and what counts as done.
• context window — The maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.

A builder's-guide tour of the agent stack you can assemble instead of training your own model. Skim past the thread-bait opening for a genuinely useful map of the layers and the tools that fill each one.

• articleAgentsChip Huyen
• articleBuilding Agents that Don't Break Themselvesfly.io
• articleA Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic EraEthan Mollick

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