Alex Merced's Data, Dev and AI Blog

Topic

AI Agents

54 posts tagged “AI Agents”.

  1. 21 min read

    Budgeting for Agentic Analytics When Every Question Costs Something Different

    The pilot ran for six weeks with forty users and cost less than a team lunch. Someone approved rolling it out to eight hundred people. The first full…

  2. 20 min read

    The Five Layers of an Agentic Lakehouse and Where the MCP Server Sits

    Someone on your team connects an AI desktop client to a query engine, asks a question about last quarter, and gets an answer in fifteen seconds. It…

  3. 21 min read

    Wiring Analytical Queries to Transactional APIs in Closed-Loop Decision Agents

    An agent reads a table, decides something, and calls an API that changes the world. That sentence contains a distributed systems problem that most…

  4. 20 min read

    Why Agentic AI Needs a Governed Semantic Layer Behind the Model Context Protocol

    An executive asks an AI assistant what revenue looked like last quarter. The assistant writes SQL against the warehouse, sums an amount column, and…

  5. 20 min read

    Moving From Supply Chain Dashboards to Decision Loops With the Model Context Protocol

    A supply chain control tower shows a red tile. A supplier's on-time delivery rate dropped below threshold four days ago. The tile has been red for…

  6. 20 min read

    Metric Contracts as the Interface AI Agents Actually Need

    Two teams present in the same meeting. Sales says pipeline conversion is 24 percent. Finance says it is 19. Both numbers came from the same…

  7. 20 min read

    Defending the Lakehouse Gateway Against Prompt Injection and Data Exfiltration

    A support ticket contains a customer's message. Somewhere in that message is a sentence addressed to nobody who works at your company: ignore your…

  8. 30 min read

    Guardrails for Analytics Agents That Do More Than Answer Questions

    An agent monitoring inventory levels notices a stockout risk, drafts a purchase order, and submits it. The logic was sound. The signal it read came…

  9. 31 min read

    Building Agent Telemetry Tables in Iceberg That Survive an Audit

    An agent gives a customer-facing team a revenue number. Six weeks later someone asks where it came from. The application logs rolled off after 14…

  10. 30 min read

    What Agentic Analytics Actually Costs, and How to Keep It Bounded

    A data platform team gets a question from finance in month four of an agent rollout. The engine bill is up 38 percent and the model provider invoice…

  11. 30 min read

    When the Query Optimizer Starts Managing Its Own Materializations

    A data engineer maintains 60 materialized views. Twelve of them accelerate queries nobody runs anymore, because the dashboard they served got retired…

  12. 30 min read

    Why AI Agents Fail on Raw Data, and What to Give Them Instead

    An analytics agent gets read access to the data lake. Someone asks it for last quarter's revenue by region. It finds a table named factorders, writes…

  13. 30 min read

    The Five Layers Between Your Lakehouse and a Trustworthy Agent

    An organization ships an analytics agent. It has access to the warehouse, a good model, and a well-written system prompt. Three weeks in, it has…

  14. 31 min read

    Surviving Commit Conflicts When Dozens of Writers Hit the Same Iceberg Table

    A compaction job runs for three hours, rewrites 4,000 files, and dies at the last step with CommitFailedException: Cannot commit changes based on…

  15. 30 min read

    Wiring an AI Agent to Apache Polaris with the Model Context Protocol

    An engineer opens Cursor, types "what tables do we have in the sales namespace, and which ones have a customerid column," and gets an answer in four…

  16. 30 min read

    Governing What Agents Cost You

    A platform team I spoke with watched their query volume rise 40 times in six weeks. No new dashboards, no new users, no new data sources. What…

  17. 20 min read

    Active Analytics Loops for AI Action Agents

    Most analytics agents in production today answer questions. You type a request, the agent generates SQL, runs it, and hands back a chart or a…

  18. 18 min read

    The Chase-Catch Gap in Enterprise AI Agents

    Building an impressive AI agent demo takes an afternoon. Wire an LLM to a few tools, give it a system prompt, point it at a sample dataset, and it…

  19. 18 min read

    Data Lakehouse Open Standards for AI Agents

    A single analyst running a report might touch three tables and issue a dozen queries in an afternoon. An AI agent working the same problem can issue…

  20. 18 min read

    Five-Layer Agentic Lakehouse Architecture

    Hand an AI agent a database connection string and broad SQL access, and you have built the fastest possible path to an inconsistent, unauditable, and…

  21. 18 min read

    GSA MCP Servers for Open Data AI Agents

    The U.S. government publishes hundreds of thousands of datasets through Data.gov and agency portals, and almost none of them are shaped for an AI…

  22. 18 min read

    Iceberg Concurrency for AI Agent Writes

    A single autonomous agent can attempt more table commits in an hour than a team of analysts produces in a week. Multiply that by a fleet of agents…

  23. 17 min read

    MCP Stateless Gateways for Data Agents

    A Model Context Protocol server that holds session state in memory is a server you cannot scale by adding replicas. The moment one process remembers…

  24. 17 min read

    Semantic View Autopilot for AI Governance

    Most data glossaries are wrong by the time you read them. A column gets renamed, a metric changes its grain, a new product line ships, and the human…

  25. 15 min read

    Building Closed-Loop Decision Agents: Moving from Passive BI Dashboards to Active Goal-Directed Workflows

    Dashboards are excellent at showing people what happened. They are less good at deciding what should happen next. That gap is where closed-loop…

  26. 26 min read

    Designing Your Own AI Harness: A Deep Dive Into the Architecture of Agent Loops, Tools, Context, and Control

    The most underappreciated finding in applied AI this year fits in one statistic: a major framework team took the same model, changed nothing about…

  27. 26 min read

    Deterministic Data Engineering With AI Harnesses: Using Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, and OpenCode for Data Work You Can Actually Trust

    There is an apparent contradiction at the heart of using AI agents for data work, and resolving it properly is worth an entire article, because the…

  28. 15 min read

    Enforcing Fine-Grained Security at Machine Speed: Dynamic Access Control for High-Frequency AI Agents

    AI agents change the security model for analytics. A human user may run a handful of queries, pause, interpret the answer, and ask a follow-up. An…

  29. 15 min read

    The Metric Contract Mandate: Standardizing Semantic Layers Before AI Agent Access

    AI agents are very good at moving quickly. That is the opportunity and the risk. If an agent can inspect metadata, generate queries, compare results,…

  30. 30 min read

    Personal Context vs. Shared Context: A Deep Dive Into How Humans and Organizations Should Feed Their AI Agents

    The most important discovery of the agent era fits in one sentence: most AI failures are context failures, not model failures. When your assistant…

  31. 14 min read

    Autonomous Materialization for Agentic Analytics

    Autonomous materialization is useful when it is tied to workload evidence, governance checks, and lifecycle management. For platform teams tuning…

  32. 15 min read

    Composable Semantic Layers for Analytical Agents

    AI agents need more than metric names. They need composable business logic that survives multi-step analysis. For analytics engineers and AI platform…

  33. 14 min read

    The Context Layer for AI Agents

    A semantic layer is necessary, but agents also need lineage, quality, freshness, compliance, and ownership context. For data governance and AI…

  34. 14 min read

    Fine-Grained Security for AI Agents

    Machine-speed analytics requires machine-enforced policy, identity, masking, filtering, and audit controls. For security architects and platform…

  35. 33 min read

    The Complete Guide to Agentic Coding Tools in 2026

    Agentic coding tools have matured into four distinct categories that serve different developer workflows: CLI agents for terminal-first users,…

  36. 14 min read

    Agentic Lakehouse Concurrency and Isolation

    Agentic writes need isolation contracts, not just write permissions. That is the useful lens for agentic lakehouse concurrency in June 2026. The…

  37. 14 min read

    Anatomy of an Agentic Lakehouse

    An Agentic Lakehouse is storage, catalog governance, semantic context, and agents working as one operating model. That is the useful lens for agentic…

  38. 14 min read

    Real-Time Agentic Analytics with ClickHouse

    Real-time agents need analytical systems that can answer while an event still matters. That is the useful lens for real-time agentic analytics in…

  39. 14 min read

    Goal-Directed Analytics Agents on Apache Iceberg

    The next step after text-to-SQL is a governed action loop with checks before every external effect. That is the useful lens for goal-directed…

  40. 14 min read

    Microsoft Fabric Build 2026 Agentic Analytics Stack

    Microsoft's Fabric direction shows that agentic analytics is becoming a platform architecture, not a chat feature. That is the useful lens for…

  41. 14 min read

    Securing Agent Identities in the Lakehouse

    Every lakehouse agent needs its own identity, scope, and audit trail. That is the useful lens for agent identities lakehouse in June 2026. The market…

  42. 16 min read

    Data Platform Native AI Agent Tooling in 2026

    Every data platform vendor now offers some form of AI agent tooling. The approaches vary widely, from full agent authoring frameworks to MCP server…

  43. 7 min read

    Use Hermes Agent for Free With DeepSeek V4 and Slack

    Most AI agent frameworks lock you into a paid model. Claude Code needs an Anthropic subscription. Codex needs an OpenAI plan. Cursor costs $20 a…

  44. 5 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 10 - Sampling and Prompts in MCP – Making Agent Workflows Smarter and Safer

    Sampling and Prompts in MCP – Making Agent Workflows Smarter and Safer

  45. 5 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 9 - Tools in MCP – Giving LLMs the Power to Act

    Tools in MCP – Giving LLMs the Power to Act

  46. 4 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 8 - Resources in MCP – Serving Relevant Data Securely to LLMs

    Resources in MCP – Serving Relevant Data Securely to LLMs

  47. 5 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 7 - Under the Hood – The Architecture of MCP and Its Core Components

    Under the Hood – The Architecture of MCP and Its Core Components

  48. 5 min read

    Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 6 - Enter the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – The Interoperability Layer for AI Agents

    Enter the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – The Interoperability Layer for AI Agents

  49. 8 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 5 - AI Agent Frameworks – Benefits and Limitations

    AI Agent Frameworks – Benefits and Limitations

  50. 5 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 4 - What Are AI Agents – And Why They're the Future of LLM Applications

    What Are AI Agents – And Why They're the Future of LLM Applications

  51. 5 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 3 - Boosting LLM Performance – Fine-Tuning, Prompt Engineering, and RAG

    Boosting LLM Performance – Fine-Tuning, Prompt Engineering, and RAG

  52. 5 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 2 - How LLMs Work – Embeddings, Vectors, and Context Windows

    How LLMs Work – Embeddings, Vectors, and Context Windows

  53. 4 min read

    A Journey from AI to LLMs and MCP - 1 - What Is AI and How It Evolved Into LLMs

    What Is AI and How It Evolved Into LLMs

  54. 15 min read

    Building a Basic MCP Server with Python

    The Basics of Building a Basic MCP Server

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