Skills to Pay the Agent Bills: Why LLMs Need Better Moves, Not Bigger Models
Runbooks are underrated. Not the glossy strategy kind. The real kind: “check this first, then open that system, then verify the thing that usually breaks, then escalate only if the next signal appears.” Most operational work is not heroic reasoning. It is structured repetition under partial information. This is exactly where many LLM agents still look strangely amateur. They can describe a process beautifully, then fail to follow it. They can hold a long context window, then ignore the one action that would move the task forward. They can retrieve prior examples, then drown themselves in irrelevant steps. Very impressive. Very expensive. Occasionally useful. ...