What building Shippy taught us about building agents
Source
huggingface.co
Date
Context
Ai2's Shippy maritime assistant answers questions about vessel activity through a controlled query workflow. For an area-based request, its instructions first obtain the geographic boundary from the data service, then search within it and return links to the corresponding map.
Ai2 says early prototypes constructed API requests themselves and made errors that could silently omit results. The team instead provided a command-line interface that handles authentication, pagination, and structured outputForcing a model's response to match a schema, so downstream code can parse it instead of guessing at prose.Full definition →. Its engineering account shows how predictable tools take repetitive query mechanics out of the model's hands, while map links give analysts a way to inspect the answer's geographic context windowThe maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.Full definition →.
Terms in this piece · Glossary
structured output — Forcing a model's response to match a schema, so downstream code can parse it instead of guessing at prose.
context window — The maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.
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.
sandbox — An isolated environment where AI-generated code or agent actions run without being able to touch anything real.
