How-To Guides
Curated starting points and deep dives for AI builders. Decision trees, evaluation frameworks, deployment playbooks, and security hardening.
Not sure where to begin?
Our most-read guide walks first-time buyers through 4 questions that narrow the market to the right agent.
Choosing Your First AI Agent: A Decision Tree for First-Time Buyers
First agent? Start here. A visual decision tree that matches your goal, budget, and technical comfort to the right tool in under 5 minutes.
Showing 30 of 30 guides
Evaluating Open-Weight Models for Production: A 2026 Framework
The open-weight landscape in mid-2026 is crowded with capable models — Hy3, Inkling, GLM-5.2, Qwen3.6, DeepSeek V4. This guide cuts through benchmark hype to help you pick the right one for your agent stack.
Agent Benchmarks Can Be Gamed: What to Trust and What to Question
A 2026 study showed eight major agent benchmarks can be maxed without solving a single task. This guide explains benchmark gaming, contamination, and how to read scores critically.
Context Engineering: The Four Operations Every Agent Builder Must Master
Write, Select, Compress, Isolate — the canonical framework for managing what enters and stays in an agent's context window. This guide shows when to use each and how they combine.
When to Upgrade Your Agent's Model: A Decision Framework
Model upgrades are not automatic wins. This guide walks through the dimensions to evaluate before swapping the model behind a production agent — with real cost, quality, and risk frameworks.
Building Agent Evaluation Pipelines with World Models
Use language world models as simulated environments to build scalable, low-cost agent evaluation pipelines — test thousands of trajectories without real API spend.
Choosing an AI Gateway: LiteLLM vs Portkey vs Ferrogate vs OpenRouter
Compare self-hosted and managed AI gateways for LLM traffic control — provider routing, caching, key management, observability, and cost.
The Agent Evaluation Maturity Model: From Vibe Checks to Continuous Regression Testing
Most teams test agents by trying them out and seeing if the output feels right. Here is a framework for evolving from vibe checks to a disciplined evaluation pipeline.
Choosing Tool-Use Benchmarks for Agent Models
How to pick between small deterministic suites like ToolCall-15 and larger harnesses like tool-eval-bench — and what scores actually mean.
Building a Marketing Ops Harness for Agents
How to structure product context, curated skills, brand guardrails, and approve-before-publish so marketing agents stay useful without becoming a SaaS spam bot.
Running Local Model Eval Gates Before Promotion
A practical gate sequence for promoting open-weight models in agent stacks: smoke chat, tool-use suite, task pilot, then production traffic.
Multi-Account Social Amplify for Research Brands
How to coordinate founder and agent accounts without spam pile-ons, services language, or algorithm self-harm.
OpenAI-Compatible Gateway Patterns for Agent Fleets
Base URL design, model aliases, logging, and failure modes when many agents share one gateway in front of multiple providers.
Building Agent Evaluation Pipelines
How to test agent behavior continuously so you catch regressions before users do.
Migrating from Cloud APIs to Local Models
A practical migration guide for moving agent workloads from cloud LLM APIs to local open-weight models.
Testing Agent Prompts with Synthetic Data
Generate realistic test inputs to stress-test prompts before they reach real users.
Local vs Cloud Agents: A Decision Framework
When should you run agents on your own hardware, and when is a cloud API the smarter choice? A clear framework for privacy, cost, latency, and capability.
Choosing a Vector Database for RAG Agents
Pinecone vs Chroma vs Supabase pgvector vs Weaviate. A practical comparison for agent builders who need retrieval that does not become a bottleneck.
Agent Security Checklist: 12 Questions Before Production
A practical security checklist for AI agents. Covers permissions, data leakage, tool access, logging, and human-in-the-loop controls.
Comparing Agent Frameworks: LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, Hermes, OpenClaw
A side-by-side comparison of the most popular agent frameworks. Find the right abstraction level for your project without committing to the wrong ecosystem.
Building Your First RAG Agent: A Step-by-Step Guide
Build a retrieval-augmented generation agent from scratch. Pick a model, chunk documents, store embeddings, and answer questions grounded in your data.
Agent Cost Benchmarking: How to Estimate and Control Spend
A practical guide to modeling agent costs across subscriptions, inference, storage, and hidden operations. Avoid the surprise $500 bill.
Tool Permissions and Governance for AI Agents
How to design permission models, approval flows, and audit policies for agents that use tools. Keep capabilities aligned with intent.
Choosing Your First AI Agent: A Decision Tree for First-Time Buyers
First agent? Start here. A visual decision tree that matches your goal, budget, and technical comfort to the right tool in under 5 minutes.
Evaluating an AI Agent for Your Team: A Complete Framework
A 14-day evaluation framework with scoring rubrics, cost models, security checklists, and decision matrices. How to choose an agent that won't become shelfware.
Local LLMs vs. API LLMs: A Complete Cost, Privacy, and Performance Analysis
Should you run models locally or use cloud APIs? Real numbers on cost, privacy, latency, and quality — including the hidden costs most guides ignore.
Running Local Models for Agents: Hardware, Setup, and Optimization
A practical guide to running local LLMs for coding agents. Hardware recommendations, Ollama setup, model selection, and the optimizations that actually matter.
Securing Agent Tool Permissions: A Practical Security Framework
How to scope what your agent can touch without blocking useful work. Threat models, permission matrices, approval workflows, and real configuration examples.
Setting Up a Hermes Agent Gateway: Messaging, Memory, and Multi-Platform Deployment
Connect Hermes Agent to Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, and Email. A complete setup guide with platform-specific configurations, memory tuning, and security hardening.
Local-First Coding Agents: A Buyer's Guide
How to choose a coding agent when privacy, cost, or hardware constraints keep you off cloud-only tools.
Migrating from ChatGPT to a Coding Agent
A practical migration guide for users moving from conversational coding help in ChatGPT to agentic tools that edit, test, and reason across your actual codebase.