Volume 5 — Agentic Systems and Tool-Using Architectures
How static generators become actors, and how to keep them from becoming raccoons with API keys.
Reports
AI-ENG-M — Agentic Orchestration: Autonomy Boundaries, Loop Budgets & Termination
Covers Agents, capabilities, Skills, Augments, workers, delegation, multi-agent synthesis, agent loops, planning, reflection, decomposition, progressive capability loading, memory use, tool selection, scratchpads, state machines, graph-based workflows, budgets, escalation, and termination. Treats autonomy as a bounded architectural affordance, not a vibe.
AI-ENG-N — Tool Contracts: Function Calling, Schemas, Validation & Idempotency
Distinguishes procedural carriers such as Skills from executable affordances such as Tools, and complete product architectures such as Augments from both. Covers schemas, validation, repair, deterministic wrappers, idempotency, side effects, transactional boundaries, confirmation gates, and safe execution.
AI-ENG-O — Action Verification: Planning, Execution, Observation & Recovery
Covers verifying that tools did what the model thinks they did. Includes post-action checks, state reconciliation, rollback paths, partial failure handling, compensating actions, tool-result grounding, and preventing hallucinated success.
Worked Example
A Refund Agent Without Giving the Model a Wallet applies Volumes 5, 7, 8, 9, and 12 to one synthetic side-effecting support workflow.
Agents, Skills, Augments, Tools, and Capabilities provides the plain-language category and lifecycle crosswalk.