Professional notes by Craig Johnston
long-form, short-form, working drafts · since 2008
long-form, short-form, working drafts · since 2008
VOL. XIX · MMXXVI
140 NOTES IN PRINT
140 NOTES IN PRINT
Tag: Agents
CXXXV
An Instrument for MCP Agent Studies
The harness behind two DOI-archived benchmark reports, and why a study premise can be killed in one working day
2026-08-01
CXXXIWhen Do Agents Use Stored Knowledge?
A benchmark that killed its own hypothesis: strong models re-derive what they can check, and a weak model trusts a stale note over the evidence in front of it
2026-07-26
CXXVIIIDoes a Semantic Knowledge Layer Make an Agent Measurably Better?
A reproducible benchmark: 42.7% to 98.7% on knowledge-trap questions, and a platform that learns from empty
2026-07-22
CXXIVThe Agent Gateway to Your Platform: mcp-data-platform
An Apache-2.0 MCP server that gives frontier models access and grounded context to everything you built
2026-07-15
CXVWhen Your Tools Lie to the Agent
I drove my own platform as a real client and told it to find every place a tool said one thing and did another. A case study in MCP SDLC.
2026-06-28
CXIIIWhere Tribal Knowledge Goes
An insight an analyst shares mid-session becomes a reviewed, signed-off change to the catalog rather than vanishing when the conversation ends.
2026-06-26
CXISteering Agents Without Caging Them
Steering agents from the server middleware instead of the tool descriptions.
2026-06-24
CIXOne Process, Many MCP Servers
Compose mcp-trino, mcp-datahub, and mcp-s3 as Go libraries behind one endpoint, instead of running three servers that can't see each other.
2026-06-22
CVIIWhy I Build MCP Servers in Go, Not Python
An MCP server faces an agent on both sides. Go lets me leash the agent that writes it and harden the contract the agent reads.
2026-06-19