@yibie: Lexifina's Alan Yahya: Tuning agent behavior is essentially promoting or demoting the resources in its hands. If you can't see inside your agent, you can't fix it. "See Inside Your Agents To Fix Them" See Inside Your Agents To Fix…
Summary
This article introduces an agent observability and behavior tuning framework: adjusting agent behavior by promoting or demoting the resources it can access (tools, memory, subagents), and discusses lenses such as performance, execution, user alignment, and sources of evidence. From Alan Yahya of Lexifina.
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Lexifina’s Alan Yahya: Tuning agent behavior is essentially promoting or demoting the resources it has access to. If you can’t see inside the agent, you can’t fix it.
See Inside Your Agents To Fix Them
Behavioral tuning — tuning agent behavior by promoting, deferring, or removing the resources an agent can access.
| Resource | Promoted | Deferred / advertised | Demoted / unavailable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tools | Full schema placed into model context | Only name/namespace advertised; schema loaded on demand | Not exposed |
| Memory | Relevant memories injected/pinned into working context | Only memory index/summary advertised; details retrieved on demand | Not searched, not injected |
| Subagents | Agent/handoff directly exposed to the model | Only lightweight description advertised; instantiated/loaded when delegated | Not exposed as delegation target |
Demotion
- Hide: The model doesn’t know it exists.
- Deprioritize: The model knows it exists, but another resource wins first.
- Gate: Only available after a certain condition is met.
- Starve: Give it fewer tokens, calls, time, or context budget.
- Scope-limit: Expose only part of its capabilities or data.
- Approval-gate: Another decision-maker, router, validator, or human must approve its use.
Promotion
- Surface: Make the model aware of this resource and when to use it.
- Rank: Prioritize it over similar resources during selection.
- Preload: Put its schema, instructions, or data into the working context before selection.
- Route to it: Send matching tasks to it instead of waiting for the model to choose.
- Give budget: Give it more tokens, calls, time, or context.
- Expand: Expose more capabilities, data, or scope.
- Permit: Remove gating or grant permission in advance.
- Persist: Keep it available across turns, requests, or sessions.
Lenses
- Performance: How well does the agent perform across runs? Compare user-approved results by speed, cost, and scale.
- Execution: Why did this run behave this way? Inspect model calls (tools, delegation) and context (compaction and retrieval).
- User alignment: Did the agent do what the user asked? Classify intent and inspect document metadata and chart changes.
Evidence
| Item | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Conversation | Did the full journey succeed? Origin, requests, branches, final outcome |
| Request | Was model performance aligned? Instruction, parent request, duration, status |
| Model call | What did the model receive and return? Model, context size, cache use, latency, output |
| Tool call | Which action ran, and did it succeed? Caller, arguments, result, error, retry |
| Agent decision | What changed the execution path? Behavioral tuning: promotion and demotion |
| Artifacts | What actually changed? Document, versions, exact diff, review status |
Original: https://lexifina.com/blog/see-inside-your-agents-to-fix-them… #AgentEngineering #AgentObservability
See inside your agents to fix them
Source: https://lexifina.com/blog/see-inside-your-agents-to-fix-them ConversationDid the full journey succeed?Origin, requests, branches, final outcomeRequestWas model performance aligned?Instruction, parent request, duration, statusModel callWhat did the model receive and return?Model, context size, cache use, latency, outputTool callWhat action ran, and did it work?Caller, arguments, result, error, retryAgent decisionWhat changed the execution path?Behavioural tuning (https://lexifina.com/blog/see-inside-your-agents-to-fix-them#behavioural-tuning):promotion (https://lexifina.com/blog/see-inside-your-agents-to-fix-them#promotion)anddemotion (https://lexifina.com/blog/see-inside-your-agents-to-fix-them#demotion)ArtifactsWhat actually changed?Document, versions, exact diff, review state
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