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agents-best-practices

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Use this skill when designing, generating an MVP blueprint for, auditing, troubleshooting, refactoring, or explaining an agentic harness for any domain. Covers provider-neutral agent architecture for OpenAI, Anthropic, and OpenAI-compatible APIs: agent loops, tool design, record provenance, interactive presentation, user-memory lifecycles, environment-adaptive tools, speculative tool execution, late-bound capabilities, permissions, system prompts, planning, goals, always-on agents and durable runtime, adaptive agent teams, context compaction, memory, skills, MCP/external connectors, public-board communications, realtime voice agents, hardware agents and board deployment, self-refining recursive harnesses, programmable context, continual refinement, observability, evals, prompt caching, agent-legible environments, feedback loops, and safety.

SKILL.md

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Observed behavior
Local scripts
Last checked
Nov 9, 2026

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2,428
Repository last updated
Oct 19, 2026
License
MIT

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# Agents Best Practices

Use this skill when the user asks how to build, improve, debug, or evaluate an agentic harness. This is a general-purpose agent architecture skill. Coding agents are one subdomain only; apply the same principles to research, finance, legal, support, operations, sales, healthcare, education, data analysis, procurement, and workflow automation agents.

## Freshness and self-update

Canonical source: [DenisSergeevitch/agents-best-practices](https://github.com/DenisSergeevitch/agents-best-practices), branch `main`. Installed copies are snapshots, not guaranteed-current guidance.

Before applying this skill in each new task:

1. **Check upstream once.** Resolve the current `main` commit through an approved network tool and compare it with the installed copy's recorded source revision. A version number alone does not prove freshness. If the copy is behind or its provenance is unknown, retrieve `SKILL.md` and the needed references from that exact commit, then reread the entry point before using it. Record the source commit and skill version in working state; keep the task on that coherent snapshot rather than mixing revisions or repeatedly polling.
2. **Persist the refresh when permitted.** A clean checkout on `main` with the verified canonical remote may update by fast-forward only. Refresh a copied installation's owned Markdown package together only when its prior baseline proves there are no local customizations; otherwise use an isolated upstream snapshot for this task. Update installer-managed packages through their supported installer, not by editing caches. Never overwrite dirty, divergent, customized, or actively maintained source trees, delete unrelated files, or bypass filesystem approval.
3. **Handle unavailable updates honestly.** If installation writes are unavailable, use the retrieved snapshot without replacing the installation. If upstream cannot be checked or retrieved, continue with the available local copy and briefly disclose that freshness is unverified, unless the user requires verified-latest guidance. Do not claim an offline or failed check made the skill current.
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