The archive · 25 essays · 6 papers · since 2016

Everything worth saying twice.

Eleven years of writing on AI agents by Alan Nichol, Founder & CTO of Rasa — the pragmatics of shipping ML, and why most "AI transformations" are just CRUD apps with extra steps.

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2025

05 pieces
Oct 14 Multi-agents are secretly distributed monoliths Rasa Blog ↗ Sep 04 Orchestrating A2A and MCP with Rasa Essay ↗ May 06 Beyond prompt-and-pray: why structured automation is the future of enterprise AI Forbes ↗ Feb 03 Self-improving CALM prompts using DeepSeek R1 Essay ↗ Jan 21 Beyond prompt-and-pray O'Reilly Radar ↗

2024

04 pieces
Oct 01 Reliable agentic bots with Llama 8B Essay ↗ Sep 19 A guide to objective and valid evaluation of chatbot implementations Essay ↗ Feb 19 Task-Oriented Dialogue with In-Context Learning Paper ↗ Feb 12 Going beyond the LLM hype: rethinking agents for production Essay ↗

2023

01 piece
Feb 24 Breaking free from intents: a new dialogue model Essay ↗

2020

07 pieces
Dec 17 We're a step closer to getting rid of intents Essay ↗ Jul 24 What's ahead in Rasa Open Source 2.0 Essay ↗ Jun 17 The 5 levels of conversational AI — 2020 update Essay ↗ May 07 Conversation-driven development Essay ↗ Feb 28 Using conversation tags to measure Carbon Bot's success rate Essay ↗ Jan 31 With Google’s Meena, are AI assistants about to get a lot smarter? VentureBeat ↗ 2020 DIET: lightweight language understanding for dialogue systems Paper ↗

2019

04 pieces
Dec 05 It's about time we get rid of intents Essay ↗ Oct 2019 Dialogue Transformers Paper ↗ Aug 31 The shift toward open source conversational AI VentureBeat ↗ May 21 Algorithms alone won't solve conversational AI — Introducing Rasa X Essay ↗

2018

04 pieces
Nov 29 Attention, dialogue, and learning reusable patterns Essay ↗ Aug 20 The next generation of AI assistants in enterprise O'Reilly Radar ↗ Apr 19 Supervised word vectors from scratch in Rasa NLU Essay ↗ 2018 Few-shot generalization across dialogue tasks Paper ↗

2017

02 pieces
Dec 2017 Rasa: Open source language understanding and dialogue management Paper ↗ Oct 04 A new approach to conversational software Essay ↗

2016

04 pieces
Sep 01 Do-it-yourself NLP for bot developers Essay ↗ Apr 12 We don't know how to build conversational software yet Essay ↗ Feb 24 On Slack and brainwaves Essay ↗ 2016 Property trends in simple metals: an empirical potential approach Paper ↗