Introduction: AI agents become powerful when they can use tools—searching the web, querying databases, calling APIs, executing code. But tool selection is where many agent implementations fail. The agent might choose the wrong tool, call tools with incorrect parameters, or get stuck in loops trying tools that won’t work. This guide covers practical patterns for […]
Read more →Category: Technology Engineering
Technology Engineering
Conversation State Management: Context Tracking, Slot Filling, and Dialog Flow
Introduction: Conversational AI applications need to track state across turns—remembering what users said, what information has been collected, and where they are in multi-step workflows. Unlike simple Q&A, task-oriented conversations require slot filling, context tracking, and flow control. This guide covers practical state management patterns: conversation context objects, slot-based information extraction, finite state machines for […]
Read more →LLM Fine-tuning Fundamentals: When, Why, and How to Customize Language Models
Introduction: Fine-tuning transforms a general-purpose LLM into a specialized model for your specific use case. While prompt engineering works for many applications, fine-tuning offers advantages when you need consistent formatting, domain-specific knowledge, or reduced latency from shorter prompts. This guide covers practical fine-tuning: when to fine-tune versus prompt engineer, preparing training data, running fine-tuning jobs […]
Read more →Document Processing with LLMs: From PDFs to Structured Data (Part 1 of 2)
Introduction: Documents are everywhere—PDFs, Word files, scanned images, spreadsheets. Extracting structured information from unstructured documents is one of the most valuable LLM applications. This guide covers building document processing pipelines: extracting text from various formats, chunking strategies for long documents, processing with LLMs for extraction and summarization, and handling edge cases like tables, images, and […]
Read more →Building AI Agents with Tool Use: From ReAct to Production Systems
Introduction: AI agents represent the next evolution beyond simple chatbots—they can reason about problems, break them into steps, use external tools, and iterate until they achieve a goal. Unlike traditional LLM applications that respond to a single prompt, agents maintain state, make decisions, and take actions in the real world. The key innovation is tool […]
Read more →Token Management for LLM Applications: Counting, Budgeting, and Cost Control
Introduction: Token management is critical for LLM applications—tokens directly impact cost, latency, and whether your prompt fits within context limits. Understanding how to count tokens accurately, truncate context intelligently, and allocate token budgets across different parts of your prompt separates amateur implementations from production-ready systems. This guide covers practical token management: counting with tiktoken, smart […]
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