ai systems¶

one question, four turns¶

One question through an agent's tool loop: think, call a tool, get a call wrong, retry, answer. The loop is not a metaphor here — the same agent node is entered four times, and the token and iteration counters say how far in you are at any moment.

fan out, barrier, synthesise¶

An orchestrator splits one research brief across three worker agents, waits for the slowest of them, and writes the answer itself. Fan-out is the easy half; the barrier — sitting still while two workers are already done — is the half that decides how long the whole thing takes.

rag pipeline¶

Retrieval-augmented generation, told twice: once with a warm cache, and once with the cache missing and a live web search standing in for the corpus. The second telling ends with an answer whose citations do not come from the documents anyone approved.

launch, negotiate, call¶

The handshake cinegram mcp performs. An agent host launches the server on stdin and stdout, agrees a protocol version with it, asks what it can do, and only then calls a tool — here sheet, which comes back as a picture of a whole scenario.