What building Shippy taught us about building agents

Shippy, Ai2's maritime analysis agent, delegates fragile query mechanics to a conventional command-line tool. Early versions constructed API requests themselves and produced pagination, geometry and filtering errors. The replacement interface handles authentication, pagination and structured results, leaving the model to choose supported commands. Ai2's engineering account describes the change.

For a question about fishing activity within a jurisdiction, the agent's instructions require it to retrieve the area's boundary before searching for events. Results go to a local file that subsequent analysis can inspect. This layering lets the team test the underlying API, the command-line tool and the agent's instructions independently.